


Threw Stones At The Stars But The Whole Sky Fell

by crazybeagle



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Broken Bones, Episode: s06e22 The Man Who Knew Too Much, Fever, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Illness, Injury, Post-Hell, Psychological Trauma, Schizophrenia, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-02
Updated: 2012-03-01
Packaged: 2017-10-31 23:50:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 41,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/349682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crazybeagle/pseuds/crazybeagle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: Extended coda/AU to 6.22, The Man Who Knew Too Much. Cas leaves the boys behind, and Dean finds himself with one broken arm, one broken car, and one broken brother. But they've had worse, and Dean figures that as long as Sam is alive and safe and with him, they can deal with everything else. But it turns out he doesn't know the half of it. Title taken from "Stable Song" by Gregory Alan Isakov.<br/>Warnings: Allusions to torture and mildly graphic self-harm. Allusions to schizophrenia but I'm not claiming to diagnose or portray it. …Yup, that should cover it. Sammy definitely gets the short end of the stick in this story, but I'm pretty indiscriminate with the whump here, so Dean and Bobby aren't really safe either…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

In the few tense seconds before Cas, for whatever reason, abruptly looked up at the ceiling and vanished in a flash of crackling, white-hot lightning, it felt as though all of the oxygen had been sucked out of the room—everything about Cas' now-formidable presence felt oppressive, terrifying, _wrong._ The very air seemed to be thrumming with power—the electric charge of a billion souls.

And despite the fact that all Dean, Sam, and Bobby could do while Cas was still standing there was gape at him in dumb disbelief—with one thought bouncing between the three of them, _holy-shit-we're-gonna-die-he's-gonna-paint-the-walls-with-our-guts-if-we-don't-do-something_ —the back of Dean's mind was screaming, _Are you KIDDING me?_

_Cas._

_God?_

…Right.

If they all made it out of this one piece, Dean was going to _kill_ him.

Somehow.

Because, as Sam had demonstrated, running him through with his own sword wasn't going to do much good.

And speaking of Sam…

If for no other reason, Dean was going to rip Cas a new one for Sam's sake. Whether or not Sam was actually going to be alright lay to be discovered, but for betraying Sam like that, Dean had an overwhelming urge to waste Cas on principle.

Even if that meant losing yet another member of his family.

But right now, that "family member" was glaring around at them imperiously, eyebrows raised, shoulders squared, radiating deadly power. Clearly he expected something of them.

Worship.

But they were all too stunned to move. Sam was breathing hard; Bobby's eyes looked about ready to pop out of his head. Now the _smart_ thing to do, Dean realized, would be to just suck it up and play along, maybe kneel or something, humor him long enough to save their lives. Probably not the best idea to test Cas' benevolence right now. Because it wasn't like this was really _Cas_ they were dealing with right now, not by a longshot.

Still didn't mean Dean was about to bow down to him. Cas had another thing coming if he thought otherwise.

At any rate, it didn't end up mattering whether any of them bowed down or not, because about five seconds, with a blinding, but unnervingly silent, burst of light, Cas was gone. And Dean wondered if it was because Cas had decided not to waste his time with them, or if it had been the merest remnants of the old Cas still in him that had given him the self-restraint not to do anything he'd end up regretting—like _smite_ them.

But even when they were left blinking away the blinding glare seared into their retinas to find themselves in a now-empty, fluorescent-lit, blood-splattered room, Dean couldn't feel much relief at their apparent deliverance. Because it couldn't be that easy. It was never that easy. They'd be hearing from Cas again soon, he was sure of it.

He didn't have too long to dwell on it, though, because a second later—with some horrible irony—Sam had fallen to his knees, as if in some demented, belated act of worship.

It took Dean a beat or two to fully snap out of it and realize what was going on, but when he did, he was on his own knees in front of Sam in about two seconds. He'd gone pale, his arms limp at his sides, and his eyes were completely, terrifyingly vacant—a thousand-yard stare directed somewhere past the opposite wall.

It was bad, but still, not quite as bad as he expected. At least he wasn't seizing on the floor. And to be honest, Dean would take whatever he could get at this point.

Dean grabbed Sam's shoulder with one hand—thanks to Crowley, he was pretty sure his other arm was broken—and shook him. "Hey, hey, Sam. Hey." No response. Sam just kept staring right past him. Or through him, really, when Dean put himself directly in Sam's line of vision. "Sam, hey, look at me. Sam. _Sam_." Still nothing. He shook him harder, and when that didn't work, slapped him, hard. It was loud, and sounded like it'd _hurt_ , but he had no time to waste on feeling bad about it now.

And it seemed to work, marginally; he blinked once, winced, and slowly raised a hand to his now-red cheek. His eyes were still unfocused. Dean shook him again. "Dude, snap out of it. Come on."

For a long, painful moment, nothing happened. Sam's hand had fallen back down from his face, and he was still staring into space, pupils dilated. Dean held his breath, squeezed Sam's shoulder tighter. _Come on, man. I can't lose you again._

But then, almost as though a switched had been flipped, he saw awareness immediately light up Sam's dull eyes. His gaze snapped to Dean's face. His body jerked violently forward, and he let out a rattling gasp as though he'd been drowning. He grabbed Dean's ( _broken_ ) arm to catch himself as he pitched forward. Dean bit back a hiss of pain and a slight wave of nausea—damn thing _hurt_ like a mother—but he didn't withdraw his arm. Not yet, anyway.

"Sam?"

Sam's head snapped up, eyes locking onto Dean's. He looked….confused. Alert, but very confused. And freaked. Definitely freaked.

"Hey, Sammy," Dean said, tone gentler now. "You with me now, buddy?"

"Dean—" His voice sounded wrecked, and his gaze slid over Dean's shoulder to scan the room around them. His eyes got huge, and Dean didn't have to turn to know what had gotten his attention—the sigil in blood, angel guts decorating the walls and floor, all that fun stuff… "What's happening? What's going on?" His grip tightened on Dean's arm, and Dean bit the inside of his mouth, hard, to keep from passing out at the feeling.

"Nothin' you need to worry about, Sammy," he ground out. "Hey, uh, do me a favor and let go of my arm?"

Sam looked down at Dean's arm, blinked, and let go. He looked back up at Dean, now blearily concerned. "Are you hurt?"

Dean shrugged with one arm, now holding his other to his middle. "Eh, I'll live," he said.

But Sam was suddenly preoccupied, staring at a bloody smear on the floor near them that must've been from some projectile chunk of Raphael. Slowly, he reached out and raked his fingers through the blood, then raised it to his face to examine it. "What's happening?" he repeated.

Dean frowned. If Sam really couldn't remember what had happened literally a minute ago, that didn't bode well. "Not 'happening,' dude. 'Happened.' Everything's fine now." Everything was _not_ fine, everything was almost hilariously far from fine, but Sam didn't need to know that right now.

"Okay…" Sam said absently, not taking his eyes off the blood.

"Tell you what," Dean said, shaking Sam's shoulder. "Let's get out of here, and I'll fill you in later, okay?"

But Sam had zoned out again. His eyes had widened, and he was staring at his bloody fingers with an expression of near horror. He shook his hand a few times, spraying Dean with blood droplets, then started scrubbing it hard, manically, against his pants-leg. "No," he muttered. "No, no…"

Dean's frown deepened.

"Hey," he said, as gently as he could manage. "Hey, just relax, okay? Just some leftover angel-goo, is all."

"Angels…" A tremor ran through Sam at the word, and he only scrubbed harder.

"Sam, stop—" Dean let go of Sam's shoulder and grabbed for his wrist, forcibly dragging his hand down to his side and pinning it there. "There's no angels, okay? We took care of 'em. So just chill out, alright?"

Sam's arm went limp in Dean's grasp. He was staring at the floor.

"He okay?" came Bobby's voice, worried, from behind them. Obviously Bobby knew better than to get too close right now, when there was no telling what was going on in Sam's head.

"Dunno yet," Dean said carefully, unsure of whether to let go of Sam or not. "Guess we'll find out." He wrung Sam's wrist a little. "Hey, Sammy, let's get you outta here, huh?"

"What?" came the barely-audible response.

"I said let's get out—" But without warning, Sam's head whipped back up, and he was now looking at Dean as though he did not even recognize him. There was a manic, almost feral, gleam in his eye, and he wrenched his hand out of Dean's grip.

Dean flexed his hand a little, baffled, wondering if he ought to be lucky that Sam hadn't broken any of his fingers just now. "Dude, what the—"

Without warning, Sam shoved Dean away from himself, and _hard_ , hard enough to knock him down and send him sprawling. A few dazed seconds later, Dean was blinking up at the dusty fluorescent lights hanging above their heads, wondering what the hell had just happened. And Bobby was suddenly hovering above him, offering him a hand, but his eyes were focused somewhere past Dean, his expression slightly shocked but calculating. Dean followed his gaze as he took Bobby's hand to pull himself back up, head spinning a little and arm aching fiercely where it had hit the floor on his way down.

Sam had apparently fallen backwards, flat on his ass, but he was scooting back and away from them as fast as he could, still glaring at them both as though they were something hostile and alien. His breathing, already rapid, had reached the point of near hyperventilation.

Dean took a slow step towards him, both hands held up in a nonthreatening gesture. "Sam…"  
Sam edged even further away.

Bobby took an equally slow step. "We ain't gonna hurt ya, kid," he said, tone placating.

"Just us, Sammy, okay?" Dean crouched down onto one knee, hands still in the air. "Dean and Bobby. Alright?"

And that seemed to strike a chord with Sam, at last. He looked between them, mouthing something, and finally croaked out, "B-bobby?" His eyes finally settled on the older hunter.

"Yeah," said Bobby, apprehensively.

"'M sorry," he mumbled softly. And Dean was sure that, no matter what the hell else was going on, or how confused his brother might be, that "sorry" came straight from the heart.

Bobby's brow knit. "What for?"

And Dean couldn't think "what for" either.

But that hardly mattered now. Sam's eyes had slid back out of focus, drifting to somewhere on the dirty, bloody floor, and Dean knew he was gone again, stuck in his head. His arms were wrapped around himself, and he was rocking back and forth slightly.

"Sam. _Sam_ ," Dean repeated, shuffling over to him and shaking his arm hard and then grabbing him under the chin, trying to get his attention once more. But it looked like a lost cause.

" _Shit_." He stood back up, scrubbing a hand over his face and suddenly feeling an overwhelming urge to call Cas's holier-than-thou hide back down here and punch him in the face for this. The risk of a smiting hardly fazed him at this point.

As it stood, he had more pressing things to deal with than retribution.

He looked down at the huddled form at his feet, hoping that there was some shred of his brother left somewhere in there, and shook his head. "What are we gonna do, Bobby?"

For several minutes, Dean and Bobby just stood there, looking down at Sam. Neither of them could say what it was they were waiting for, really—maybe for Sam to wear himself out, fall asleep, they didn't know.

"We gotta get outta here," Dean said after awhile, breaking the stifling silence. "We don't want you-know-who change his mind and come zap our asses with a lightning bolt. Let's hope Sam took a car, because I don't think ours is gonna do much good." And it was stupid, he knew, and in light of the current situation, comparatively trivial, but the Impala being totaled, _again_ , was enough to make him see red.

"What I wanna know is how he even got himself here in one piece," Bobby said, shaking his head down at Sam in wonderment. "How the hell'd he pull himself together enough to—"

"Bus," came Sam's voice, abruptly.

Dean started. "What?"

Sam peered up at them from beneath the hair that had fallen into his face. "I took the bus," he said, words slow and shaky.

Dean let out a sigh of relief at the sight of Sam's now mostly-clear gaze. "That's good, Sam," he said. "That's real good." He held out a hand to help him up.

But Sam just stared at the offered hand, blankly, then up at Dean, as though unsure what to do.

Okay, maybe Sam wasn't _all_ here, but they'd work with what they had. "How far's the bus station from here, dude?"

Sam bit his lip, obviously concentrating. "Fifteen miles…maybe…." he said, haltingly, after awhile.

"Well how'd ya get here from there?" Bobby asked. "You rent a car or somethin'?"

Sam nodded.

Dean's blood ran cold. He hadn't given any thought as to _how_ Sam would get himself here when he'd left him the address, more focused on the desperate hope that he'd show up at all instead of the seemingly likelier option of never waking up at all. But if he'd been anything like _this_ while trying to drive, however short the distance, he could've easily gotten himself killed. "And you got here okay?" Dean asked quietly. "No accidents or nothin'?"

Sam shook his head tightly. "It's late. The roads are pretty empty. And I…I pulled over, when I needed to."

Oh man. Dean quickly pushed aside sudden, vivid mental pictures of Sam collapsed on some dashboard, with a mind full of hellfire, on the shoulder of some godforsaken country road. Or worse, of this car flipped over in some ditch, tires still spinning, Sam trapped inside.

Bobby glanced at Dean. It was clear he didn't like hearing that anymore than Dean did. But he half-smiled down at Sam, nodded approvingly, and said, "You did good, kid. Now what do you say we go find that rental car, yeah?"

"'Kay."

It took another two or three minutes to get Sam's flustered brain to remember exactly where he'd parked the car—about a block away—and Bobby set off to retrieve it and pull it around closer to the building's entrance. In the meantime, Dean sat with Sam, trying his damndest to keep him lucid. Usually, the keep-Sammy-lucid protocol—which tended to be necessary more than Dean would've liked to see in his lifetime, Sam being the danger-magnet that he was— involved Dean rambling on and on about something stupid and mundane, which for whatever reason Sam seemed to like to listen to. Always had. But for one of the first times in his life, Dean came up short, too overwhelmed to think of a single damn thing to talk about. Which was bad, considering this was probably the one time Sam needed it most, because if he retreated back inside his head, there was no telling if he'd make it out again. So he just started talking, and just about kicked himself for the first thing that came unbidden out of his mouth.

"You came back," he said absently, then winced. _Way to go, moron. The idea is to get him OUT of his head, not remind him he got stuck in it…_ But he couldn't deny that, as shitty as the situation had been, the moment he saw Sam, sneaking up behind Cas with a weapon in hand, a hundred percent focused, he couldn't have been prouder.

Sam looked at him, a strained smile on his face. "Had t-to, didn't I?"

Dean returned the smile. "Yeah, I'd have kicked your ass if you didn't."

The smile melted as Sam glanced at the blood-splattered walls again. "F-fat lotta g-good it did, though, huh?" Sam was having trouble forming his words, and his eyes kept squinting as though he couldn't focus them. In any other circumstances, that would've been Dean's cue to check Sam for a head injury. But as it stood, he was about 95% sure that wasn't the issue here, and at any rate, he had no way of knowing that Sam wasn't going to freak out at physical contact again.

He sighed. "Don't say that," he told Sam. "Cas is so hopped up on soul-juice right now that none of us coulda stopped him. And for the record, dude, you coming up behind him with the sword like that? Totally badass."

"Didn' work…" Sam growled. He was tracing a crack in the floor with an unsteady finger.

"That's just 'cause Cas is a bigger douchebag than any of us thought, dude. Woulda worked otherwise. Anyways," he said, " _I'm_ glad you came back. What would I do without my one-man Geek Squad to back me up, huh?"

Sam didn't say anything for a long time. Then, "He was wrong."

"Who?" Dean asked cautiously.

Sam looked up, eyes haunted but jaw set, resolute. "He s-said I couldn't handle it, but he was wrong."

Dean just stared, not sure he even wanted to know what the hell Sam was talking about. He could think of a few likely candidates as to who _he_ might be, none of them good.

But a few seconds later and Sam was drifting again, eyes sweeping languidly somewhere over Dean's head.

"Who?" Dean asked urgently, in an attempt to reign in Sam's focus once more, whether he wanted to hear it or not. "Who said?"

"The _other one_ ," Sam whispered, still looking over Dean's head.

Sam's tone sent an involuntary chill down Dean's spine, but he kept pressing. "The other _what_?"

"The one who remembers," Sam said.

The question was out before he could stop it. "Remembers what?"

"Hell," Sam said simply, eyes on the ceiling.

Dean felt sick.

Sam kept talking. Fast now. Babbling, almost. "But he was _wrong_ ," he insisted. "H-he said I couldn't handle it, but I told him. I told him I had to. Had to handle it. Dean, I _had_ to. I could do it. Could try. He was _wrong._ " His eyes, now bright, had finally settled on Dean once more.

Dean didn't trust himself to speak. He wasn't sure anything would come out if he tried. He didn't have a clue what this was about or what brought it on, but if he knew one thing, it was that he friggin' _hated_ this.

"S-so I killed him. He let me kill him. And then all the pieces were back together again, and then….and then…" His breath hitched. "He was _wrong_. Dean. He was wrong, wasn't he?" He looked desperate, searching Dean's face for some sign of confirmation.

"Yeah, Sammy," Dean managed, voice hoarse. "He was wrong."

_To Be Continued._


	2. Chapter 2

Dean felt bad about making Bobby drive around until they could find a motel a good few towns away from here, because even if Bobby hadn't broken any bones himself, he'd still been inside of a car that got flipped, and then pushed down a flight of stairs. And based on the stiffness of Bobby's movements, Dean could tell that he'd be feeling it for days, if not weeks, to come. But with one incapacitated limb and one incapacitated little brother, there wasn't much Dean could do but let Bobby deal with it.

After Dean had herded Sam into the car—which hadn't been too terrible, because Sam had been obedient, if a bit lethargic—Bobby offered to head to the hospital first so Dean could get his arm taken care of. But one look at Sam's drained face was enough to tell him that the kid had more than had it for one day, and taking him out in public, even 4-AM-in-some-backwoods-ER-public, wasn't happening. They'd have to find a room. Dean could head back out on his own, or at least be dropped off at an ER front entrance if they found one before they found a motel. Because as much as Dean didn't want to deal with hospital staff right now, and _really_ didn't want to leave Sam on his own, it really was better to get this kind of thing out of the way as soon as possible so they didn't make it any worse, in case his bones needed resetting, and it wasn't like he could make a decent cast on his own. And he wasn't gonna lie, the promise of hospital-strength painkillers did sound pretty appealing right now, because _damn_ if he didn't freaking hurt all over right now... And Bobby'd probably appreciate it if he shared them.

As they headed for the main road, Dean tried not to wince when they passed the pitifully upended Impala. It was gonna be a bitch and a half to fix, the hood as good as crushed, but he tried not to think about that.

"What happened?" Sam asked, frowning at the car. He and Dean were crammed into the backseat of a beat-up, stuffy green sedan that smelled like cats and pine air fresheners. Sam's knees were wedged up against the back of the driver's seat, looking absurdly huge and out-of-place in such a small car. But Dean didn't fail to note that he'd pressed himself as close to the car door as he could, as far from Dean as he could manage.

"Crowley invited some friends to come play," Bobby said grimly. "Gonna have to leave it here for awhile 'till we can figure out how to get it towed, ain't much we can do about that. This place is in the middle 'a goddamn nowhere though, so I figure it'll be alright for a day or two. Just gotta make sure we get back to it before the cops do."

Dean grimaced and tried—to little avail— to put it out of his mind.

Thank God, at least, for the fact that, even though their all their bags and things had to be left behind in the Impala's trunk, he and Bobby had had their phones in their pockets the entire time. Bobby's phone still seemed to be working fine, for now at least; the screen of Dean's own had cracked and the screen light had dimmed a bit, but it appeared still functional. He'd left his wallet on the car seat, which was just as well— he could claim he'd been mugged when he finally got to the hospital. Bobby did still have some cash on him, enough for a room at least; Sam had used the last of his own on the rental.

A subdued silence settled over them after that. For all the shit that had gone down, and despite the angry throbbing in his arm, Dean felt numb, so exhausted he couldn't see straight. He almost nodded off a few times, but he kept catching movement out of the corner of his eye.

It took him awhile to realize what he was seeing, because every time he'd looked over at Sam, nothing appeared to have changed, but a minute or two of watching him and he figured it out. Every now and then, Sam was twitching, flinching as though he'd been hit.

"Sam?" he asked, worried now. Without really thinking about it, he reached over to tap Sam's shoulder, get his attention.

Sam jerked violently at the touch, nearly hitting his head on the car ceiling. "Gah…W-what?" he stuttered out.

Dean frowned, not liking it one bit that Sam was freaking out so much at having his shoulder touched. "You okay? You look kinda…"

Sam nodded rapidly. "Yeah. Yeah, 'm good." He sounded a bit choked, and was looking anywhere but at Dean.

Dean watched him for a few minutes. The twitching hadn't let up, and it was now coupled with something that worried Dean even more—Sam's eyes were darting all over the car interior, for once very much focused, as though they were tracking something that Dean couldn't see. He looked panicked.

Dean's stomach dropped. _He's seeing things._

"Sam, hey—" He hesitated for a second, briefly questioning the wisdom of what he was about to do, but then went ahead and did it anyway—he laid a hand on Sam's arm, and then gripped it tight, hoping against hope that it would help instead of hurt. Sam yelped and just about jumped out of his seat this time, but Dean held on tighter. "Hey, look at me, okay?" he said, loudly and clearly. "Right at me." Sam did. And it wasn't so much _panic_ that Dean saw now on his brother's face as it was _terror._ His breath was coming in harsh gasps.

Bobby glanced at them in the rearview mirror, looking worried. "He still holdin' up alright?"

"'Course he is," Dean said, eyes not leaving Sam. "'Course you are, aren't you?"

Sam pursed his lips. The message was clear. _No, I'm really not._

Dean wrung Sam's wrist. "You're _fine_ , you understand? You're safe. We're gonna take care of you."

But Sam was watching something over Dean's shoulder, darting eyes tracking a path around and around the car interior. He looked faint. "Dean—"

" _No_ ," Dean barked. "Sam, I don't care what the hell else you think you're seeing, you _look at me_ , only at me, man. Got it _?_ "

With what appeared to be a tremendous effort, Sam complied, but he was clearly resisting the urge to continue to follow the thing with his peripheral vision. Dean dug his fingernails into Sam's wrist every time he tried to. After the third or so time, when Dean was sure that he was going to make Sam's wrist bleed if he kept it up, Sam gave him a miserable look, shaking his head almost imperceptibly. _I can't do this._

Dean suppressed a shudder at whatever it was that was so bad that Sam must be seeing to make him want to give up like that, and dug a finger into a tender spot on the back of Sam's wrist that he knew would hurt like a bitch, anything to grab his attention and keep it. Sam cringed and tried to withdraw his hand, but Dean didn't let go. "Hey, remember what you told me earlier? He was wrong, right? He was wrong," Dean said, his tone beseeching. Of course, he still had no clue who "he" was. But whatever it was that had gone down in Sam's head, "he" was somehow pivotal in regard to Sam's sanity, Dean knew that for sure.

Sam bit his lip and nodded. Dean smiled encouragingly, trying not to let it falter when he caught Bobby's apprehensive glance reflected in the rearview.

"See?" Dean said. "There ya go. Come on, what the fuck would _he_ know, anyway? You're gonna take this thing by the horns, whatever it is, and kick its ass six ways from Sunday. Got it?"

Sam half-smiled, uncertainly, and nodded. He was wearing that _look_ , that one where he wasn't really buying what Dean was telling him, but trusted him enough to be willing to go along with it, for both their sakes.

And he seemed calmer, after that. Less flinching, and his breathing evened out, and in a few minutes he seemed intently focused on the overcast night sky speeding past outside to the exclusion of all else. Dean waved off Bobby's offers to pull over, and in a few minutes had nearly dozed off himself. That is, until he felt the wrist he'd forgotten he'd still had a hold of being torn violently out of his grasp, followed closely by an inarticulate grunt and a fist connecting with his nose.

Another minute, and Bobby had pulled over.

Another ten, and Sam was hunched over and contrite in his seat, muttering a string of apologies, Dean dazed and holding an old napkin they'd found in the glove compartment under his bleeding and broken nose. Sam had apparently snapped out of whatever reverie he'd been in only to freak out, again, at physical contact and proximity to another person. After punching Dean, he tried, and almost managed to, rip the door open and fling himself out of the moving car. And if it hadn't been for Bobby's fast reaction pulling over, swerving onto the gravelly shoulder of the country road, he would have. While Dean fished around for something to mop himself up with, Bobby had, as discreetly as possible, turned on the child-safety locks. When Sam finally realized where he was and what was going on, he was horrified and humiliated, twitching again and stammering out apologies. And for the rest of the trip, Dean couldn't count the number of times he'd ground out through a haze of pain and watery eyes that he was fine, he wasn't angry.

That was Dean's first indication of just how bad things really were.

The second came at around eight or nine the next morning.

Bobby had dropped Dean off at the ER at around 3:30 AM before taking Sam with him to a motel a couple blocks down the road. Dean had planned to be in and out of the ER in a few hours—maybe a few x-rays, a cast on his arm, and hopefully some _very_ strong painkillers—long before they figured out he had no insurance to speak of. But of course, it was while he was walking up to the desk to get his paperwork in the ER waiting room that his body chose to remind him that he'd been running on fumes and he passed out in front of the receptionist's desk.

Now it's not like passing out was all that big a deal in itself, or like it didn't happen all that much if you were a hunter—it was mostly just annoying, inconvenient, or embarrassing, depending on the situation. In this case, it was all three. The ER was the last place you wanted to pass out, and it was never any use trying to explain to medics that it _wasn't that big a deal_. He'd woken up not long after, lying in a hospital bed and being bitched at by a middle-aged ER nurse about low blood sugar and _When is the last time you ate or slept_ and _Where did all these bruises come from_ and he just wished she'd shut the fuck UP and hurry up with the cast so he could get out of here. _Lady, YOU hang out with your comatose little brother a few days and see if you have much of an appetite either._ Not that she didn't mean well, because it probably looked pretty alarming for a guy with blood all over his face and down his front to stumble into an ER and then pass out before he could explain what was wrong, but it was no use pulling an "it's not what it looks like" at a hospital. And seriously, he didn't have time for this. He needed to get back to Sam and Bobby. But of course, when you try to ask a doctor to hurry up, it never works—he and Sam had always had a theory that the more times you asked, the more they took their sweet time about things.

They'd x-rayed him while he was out, and diagnosed the breaks that he'd already known were there—broken arm, broken nose, pretty much run-of-the-mill—and were now running a glucose drip or something along with painkillers through an IV. And the painkillers? Not bad. Not bad at all. But they made his head too fuzzy to be much good harassing the doctors into giving him his phone back to check on Sam, damn them. He had to say, though, it made getting his arm reset a breeze, and he couldn't even feel his nose at all. And nobody had even approached him about insurance yet. Probably because they thought he was too loopy to deal with it, which he was.

But falling asleep for several hours after he should technically have been good to go? That was a really shitty thing to do. Sam was clearly barely hanging onto reality right now, and Bobby was, to put it bluntly, a 60-year-old man who had just been pushed down a staircase. So in a lot of ways, they were worse off than he was, and that knowledge alone should've kept him awake and ready to get out of here.

But it didn't. And he should feel super guilty, but exhaustion and pain and _drugs_ were a little hard to argue with, as well as the temporary, if artificial, reprieve from responsibility of any sort and thoughts of _HolyCrapWhatDoWeDoAboutCas_ and, more urgently, _HolyCrapWhatDoIDoAboutSam._

So yeah, he fell asleep…

…Only to wake up, oddly, to Sam himself, standing by the side of the bed and shuffling his feet, a puzzled-looking young nurse with a clipboard at his elbow. She was peering between Dean and Sam over the top of the clipboard, addressing one or both of them by a name that definitely wasn't theirs. _Hagar_ or something…

It took a few more seconds before he could form enough cohesive thought through the thick fog of meds to realize—oh, right—that was the alias they'd all agreed on before he'd showed up here.

"Mr. Hagar?" the nurse repeated, obviously speaking to Dean but shooting apprehensive glances up at Sam, who was clearly not all there, eyes roving nervously around the room. "We have a…visitor for you. He couldn't provide an identification, but he showed up asking for you. He says he's your brother?"

Dean managed a nod. He tried to elaborate but his tongue and throat felt like sandpaper. He swallowed. "He is," he croaked. He knew it was probably a pretty big breach of hospital protocol to let an unidentified visitor, and a pretty spacey-looking one at that, into the ER. But hey, he couldn't blame the girl, or the rest of the hospital staff, for that matter—if he were them, he wouldn't have tried to get in Sam's way right now either. Somebody of Sam's stature could easily snap this girl in half like a twig. Not that Sam ever _would_ lay a finger on her, regardless of mental state, but clearly she hadn't wanted to wait around to find out.

Sam didn't look particularly threatening right now, though, that was for sure. He was just standing there, fidgeting, not looking at either Dean or the nurse.

"Sam," Dean said, rather louder than necessary, trying to get his attention. "Dude. Hey."

Sam's brow furrowed but his eyes were fixed on the floor tiles. The nurse looked extremely uncomfortable. After 30 seconds or so of hovering, she finally flitted over to the chair near the bed and dragged it around so that it was facing the bedside. She turned to Sam and pointed at it. "Um, you can sit, if you'd like."

Sam's head snapped up. "What?" He took in the chair, and her concerned face, and then said, "Oh," shuffling over to it and sitting down. "Thanks."  
The nurse looked down at him, and then looked at Dean, uncertain. "Is he—" She trailed off, as though unsure how best to phrase the question.

And then, with an unprecedented burst of clarity, Sam looked up at her, gaze clear. "Yeah," he said, with an embarrassed, apologetic grin. "I'm sorry. I'm fine. I'm a…um, I'm a schizophrenia patient, I'm sorry I didn't mention that. I've got documentation, but I sort of left it at home."

The nurse blinked. "Oh. Um, okay…" She glanced at Dean.

Numbly, Dean nodded affirmation, though suddenly feeling as though somebody had punched him in the gut. _Schizophrenia? What the…_

"Sorry if I, uh, scared you or anything," Sam continued, sounding totally normal and conversational. But Dean didn't miss the white-knuckled grip he had on the bedrail, as if he was trying to keep himself from drifting off again. "I got a little distracted since _this_ happened," he inclined his head at Dean, "…And I forgot my pills." Dean had to admit he was really damn proud that Sam was focused enough to come up with a convincing lie on the spot in order to keep himself from getting hauled off to the psych ward, but the implications of the lie—that he was acting bizarre enough for her to buy it—were painful.

But his brother was _not_ crazy. He _wasn't._

"Oh," the nurse said—again— tucking her hair behind her ear, her expression tinged with pity. "Are you gonna be okay now?"

Sam nodded earnestly. "Oh, yeah. I got the pills in my pocket now. And Dean knows what to do if…uh, if anything happens."

"Alright…" She stood there for a moment, appearing as though she couldn't decide whether to stay or go. She looked young, Dean thought, probably an intern, and like she _really_ didn't want to be here or know how to begin to handle a situation like this. If she'd been a professional, given Sam's state, she probably would've tactfully and discreetly found a reason to stay and monitor the visit. But this girl just seemed uneasy and uncertain, her face flushing.

"Hey, you can go if you want," Dean told the girl, with as reassuring a smile as he could manage. "Really. We'll be fine. And besides, I bet they got you hopping around doing a million things at once, huh? But thanks for helping Sammy out here." Sam offered a small, shaky grin of his own.

The girl flushed even deeper red, and smiled in return, flustered. "Oh. Um. No problem."

Dean was more than a bit pleased at the fact that this was working as well as it was, busted and swollen nose plus two probably blackening eyes notwithstanding. So as she turned to go, he decided to push his luck. "Oh, hey," he called after her. She wheeled around. "Sorry if this is a total pain in the ass, but d'you think you could maybe try to find my phone and clothes and stuff? I've been askin' and askin' and I kind of need 'em back. Got people I gotta contact, let 'em know I'm okay." That was a bit of a lie—if Sam was here, Bobby must be here somewhere, too.

The girl nodded, her ponytail bobbing up and down. "Oh. Yeah," she said, a little breathily. "No problem. Be right back." And with a newfound spring in her step, she left.

Dean shook his head and grinned as he watched her go. "Guess I still got it, huh?"

But Sam wasn't amused. He was staring up at the vitals monitor by the other side of the bed, and the IV pouch, and then back at him. "Dean, what—are you okay? D-did they find something?" He was stammering again, the moment of complete clarity apparently diminishing. "You sh-shoulda been out of before now."

Dean sighed, sat up, and rubbed his eyes, wincing as his fingers accidentally met the sore bridge of his nose. "I'm _fine_ , Sam. I'm just a moron who forgot to eat once or twice." _…Or sleep…_ But he didn't need to mention that part. Truth be told, he hadn't been all that good about remembering to make himself get an adequate amount of either since, well, since he'd left Lisa and Ben behind for the last time, even with Sam nagging him about it. Helluva time for it to catch up with him. Not that Sam could blame him for it; it was something they both did—when the going got tough, the priority of bodily necessities subconsciously got kicked down a few notches, and this wouldn't be the first time that one of their bodies decided to pick an inconvenient or public place to remind them that it was being neglected. Adrenaline and coffee and booze could only get you so far. Two years ago, Sam had undergone a long stint of time where he'd been terrified to fall asleep because of the access it would give Lucifer to his mind, and after he'd blacked out from exhaustion one night at a Laundromat, Dean had had to start forcing sleeping pills on him.

Sam's eyes narrowed. "Forgot to eat?"

"Passed out in the ER."

"Passed out?"

"Yeah, kind of. Not one of my finer moments."

"Oh…" he blinked. "But are you sure that's all—"

"Yeah, I'm sure, Sammy. Broken arm, broken nose, and some awesome bruises. That's _it._ "

"Okay…" His hands were still worrying the bedrail, gripping and wrenching the plastic covering. "B-but Dean, how long's it been s-since you ate something?"

"Probably not as long as it's been since _you_ ate something," Dean said dryly.

Sam scowled, but said nothing, and Dean would be willing to bet that Sam hadn't had anything to eat since before Cas broke the wall. He'd have to be lightheaded or at least fatigued by now. They'd have to fix that.

"Why d-didn' you call?" Sam asked, and Dean's heart sank as he saw that Sam was once again tracking something that wasn't there with his eyes across the taupe-colored curtain that served as a barrier between his bed and the rest of the ER.

"Cause they had me doped up to the gills and wouldn't give me my phone. I fell asleep. I'm really sorry, man." But Sam appeared to have lost interest in him, watching the curtain. " _Sam_ ," Dean said.

"Huh?" Sam asked absently. "Oh. What?"

"I said, they took my phone. Now where's Bobby? I wanna get outta here before we have to deal with, you know, having to _pay_ for any of this," he said in an undertone.

Sam nodded. "Y-yeah. Yeah, definitely. Let's go."

Dean raised an eyebrow. "Dude, you didn't answer my question," he said slowly. "Where's Bobby?"  
Sam was silent for a long moment. Then, "I don't know." He looked suddenly paler.

" _What_?"

"I don't know," Sam repeated. He shook his head. "I…I have no idea." Panic crept into his voice.

"Whoa, okay, just calm down," Dean said, patiently, trying to ignore his sudden, _very_ bad feeling about all this. "If you don't remember, that's fine. You're here, right? That means he's gotta be here too."

Sam's brows furrowed. "I d-don't think he is, Dean," he said slowly.

"Why not? I mean, how'd you get here then? Did you take the car?"

Sam looked as though he was reeling, as though something horrible was just now dawning on him. "I don't think I did take the car," he said breathlessly.

"What, so you walked?" Dean asked. Sam was quiet. " _Talk_ to me, man," he said, fear lodging itself in his chest. "If something bad happened to Bobby, we gotta know. What do you remember?"

"I don't re—" he started, then his eyes got huge. "Wait. T-there was…something…in the room," he whispered.

Dean sat up some more and leaned forward. "Whoa, what, in the motel room?"

Sam nodded. "Yeah. Something…bad… I was gonna call you 'cause you were late, and then…then Bobby was gone and _something_ was…was in the room with me."

"What was it?" Dean asked. His own voice had gone weirdly quiet. He cleared his throat. "Sam, what was it?"

"I…I don't…" His fists were clenched around the bedrail so hard Dean almost thought he might crush it.

" _Sam_ ," Dean put his un-casted hand on top of one of Sam's. He knew he was at risk for another punch in the face, but at least it got his attention. "Man, you gotta focus. Was it real?"

Sam looked confused. "R-real?"

"What you saw in the room. Was it real, or were you imagining it?" He tightened his grip on Sam's hands, painfully, when Sam's gaze started to wander. " _Answer_ me."

Sam looked up, eyes bright. "I don't _know_ ," he said hoarsely.

Dean shut his eyes and slackened his grip on Sam's hand. The last thing in the world he wanted to do right now was upset Sam, but if Bobby was in trouble, he needed to know. "The thing you saw," he said at last, feeling drained, "did it hurt Bobby?"

"I don't—"

"Sam," he interrupted, "Did _you_ hurt Bobby?"

Sam was quiet. He looked dazed; there were tears in his eyes.

"Sammy, I gotta know," Dean said gently. "Okay? Just tell me what you remember."

Sam took a halting breath, shook his head a little. "Okay. Yeah. 'M sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry for, man. Just talk to me."

"I was…was gonna call you," he said, his voice rapid and a little stronger. "I dunno where Bobby was, maybe he was there. And then there was something…else… there, with me. I think I hit it or something, knocked it down, maybe, and then I ran. To find you, I guess. 'Cause I ended up here. I don't really remember how. I'm sorry," he repeated anxiously.

"That's good, Sammy. That's all I wanted to know. You did good." He nodded and patted Sam's arm, trying to be reassuring, despite the sickening feeling that he knew exactly what had happened. "And _don't_ be sorry. Let's just call Bobby and see what he's up to, alright? You got your phone?"

Sam nodded mechanically, reached into his pocket, and handed it over.

Dean flipped it open and speed-dialed Bobby.

No answer.

He bit back his dread, and snapped the phone shut. "Eh, it's probably fine. I'm sure he's just—"

But at that very second his words were cut off by a commotion in the hallway. Some girl—maybe college age—was being wheeled down the hall of the ER on a gurney, surrounded by a frantic-looking trauma team. They didn't get to see much of her before she was wheeled past the gap in their curtain, but Dean's stomach turned when he caught a whiff of burned hair and a glimpse blackened flesh on her arm.

And the _screaming._

Over and over. The sound reverberated down the hall, wrenching and terrible.

And Sam, frozen, stared after her.

Dean winced as another scream tore from the girl, echoing down the hall to them.

"Sam…" Dean began, stomach roiling.

Sam's face was completely leeched of color. His mouth was hanging open. He looked as though he'd forgotten how to breathe. "W-what…" he began.

Okay, Dean was pretty sure that this had to be the universe cosmically fucking with them somehow. The world's worst timing, and what were the odds of this happening, seriously.

…Even if they were in a stupid ER. This wasn't fair.

"Dude, it's okay," Dean said, teeth grating as she screamed again. "It was just her arm. I'm sure she'll be—"

"What's going on?" he asked faintly, cringing and shuddering at each of the girl's cries. He looked at Dean, confused, pleading. "W-where are we?" He blinked. "Dean?"

The girl screamed again.

"We're at the hospital, Sammy, remember?" Dean tried putting his hand on Sam's arm again, but Sam recoiled as though he'd been burned himself.

"The hospital…" Sam parroted, but obviously still uncomprehending.

"Yeah. The hospital. Everything's fine, Sammy, okay?" Once again, everything was definitely _not_ fine, and _damn_ this was hard to just sit here and watch, especially when he couldn't even freaking _touch_ Sam without him going ballistic.

"Dean?" he repeated, his voice small.

"Yeah, I'm here, buddy."

"Can we go?" He gasped sharply as she screamed again, eyes spilling over. "Please?"

"Yeah," Dean said, his own voice thin. "Yeah, Sammy. We can. As soon as Bobby gets here, alright? I promise."

The screaming cut off, abruptly. Dean wondered if the girl had passed out. Or worse.

And that was when Sam collapsed overtop of the bedrail. Dean quickly pushed the button to lower it, and Sam slumped unceremoniously onto the sheets somewhere near Dean's knee, shoulders heaving.

"Sammy?"

No response. Just the sound of loud, fast breathing, and the sight of fists clenching around hospital sheets.

Dean just stared down at him, wishing more than anything he could will away the odor of charred flesh that lingered in the air. After a moment, he nudged Sam's head with his knee. Still no change. He huffed a sigh and leaned back against the raised end of the bed. He still felt about seventy five percent burned out, all his senses dulled from the drugs.

A few more tries dialing Bobby yielded no result. He settled down to wait, but he must've dozed again, because the next thing he knew the same nurse from before had come back in, a bundle of what he realized were his clothes from before and a Ziploc containing his phone under her arm. Her brows knit and she pursed her lips as she took in Sam, who hadn't moved. The abrupt, muffled noises that cut through the otherwise silent room sounded like choked sobs. "I brought your stuff," she said softly, setting her load down at the foot of the bed. "What happened? What's wrong?" she said, inclining her head towards Sam. Dean didn't miss that she seemed not to want to come any closer to Sam than necessary, and truth be told, he didn't know if he wanted her near Sam either, for her own sake, or he might not be the only one who wound up with a broken nose.

Dean shrugged. "He's just kinda overwhelmed, that's all," he said, hoping he sounded calm or at least composed. "Hospitals are definitely not his thing. And, uh…" he cleared his throat. "That girl, earlier. Kind of bothered him." He paused. "Hey, do you know, is she gonna be—"

She looked mildly surprised he was asking. "Oh. Um, with the burns?"

"Yeah."

The nurse looked tentative, but nodded. "Yeah, um, I think she'll pull through, definitely. But it was a pretty bad kitchen fire, and that means oil, so…" she shifted her weight a little and looked down at her shoes. "But it looks worse than it is, even though she's in a lot of pain, 2nd and 3rd degree burns and all that. I didn't help treat her or anything, but that's why they said she wouldn't calm down." She was speaking a little too quickly, and her lips were twitching when she finished.

Dean watched her for a moment. "You alright?" he asked. Thing like that had to be tough for a small-town intern to watch. Hell, it'd be hard for anyone to watch.

The girl sniffed once, delicately, and looked up, expression normal other than slightly shiny eyes. "Yeah, of course," she said, making a valiant stab at regaining professionalism. She smoothed the front of her scrubs. "Tell, uh, tell your brother that she'll be alright, okay?"

"You hear that, Sam?" he relayed gently when she had gone. "That girl's gonna be okay."

There was no answer.

He hadn't expected one.

_To be continued…_


	3. Chapter 3

An indeterminate amount of time passed, maybe an hour or two, and uneventfully. Sam, not having moved from his spot hunched over the bed, eventually fell asleep. That was a mercy, even though it was a sleep laced with shuddering and jerking and inarticulate mumbling. The older nurse who'd bitched him out about food and sleep tried to force another dosage of painkillers on him, and while that actually would've been nice, he'd had to refuse, and vehemently, because there was nobody else to watch Sam, and he didn't want to wake up from being doped up high as a kite to find out that they'd dragged Sam off to some rubber room.

And so he'd gritted his teeth against a feeling like a dull spike being driven into the center of his face, popped open Sam's phone with one hand, tried dialing Bobby a few times, and leaving a voicemail, but to no avail. For about an hour he was on the verge of putting in a 911 call, and had even started dialing, unable to banish a vivid mental image of Bobby with his skull bashed in or bleeding out all over some ratty motel carpet. But the implications of calling stayed his hand. If he called and Bobby was okay, he'd be pissed at Dean having set the cops on them, whose attention they certainly didn't need, especially having just fled a veritable gore-splattered crime scene. If he called and Bobby _wasn't_ okay, then Sam would get taken away, arrested for murder and then probably committed. And Sam might be too broken up to even try to defend himself against any of that.

But if Bobby was alive and he needed help…

Dean decided he'd give it another hour and then call, despite the potential consequences, and maybe pester the staff in the meantime into seeing if there were any new ER arrivals the next time somebody came in. He stared at the ugly mauve of the dividing curtain and the occasional pair of scrubs bustling by until his eyes had gone bleary. His resolve not to call for an hour crumbled after only about thirty minutes, worry for Bobby overcoming his innate mistrust of cops under any circumstances. If Bobby really was gone, Dean was willing to face down every cop in the state before they could get to Sam if he had to. But, of course, when he went to make the call, Sam's phone chose then to run out of juice and die on him. He'd noticed the battery dwindling when Sam first gave it to him, knowing that it couldn't have been charged since before the Wall had come down. However, he'd clung to the hope that karma or something like that owed them a bit of a break after all that had happened and that therefore the phone would hold on just a bit longer, but no such luck.

_Well shit._

He squeezed his eyes shut.

Despite his best efforts not to, he ended up dozing off, the useless phone in his limp hand, only to be roused when the younger nurse stepped back in.

Followed by Bobby.

Dean sighed, tension leaving him like a crushing load being lifted from his shoulders at the sight of the older hunter.

"Another visitor," the nurse announced.

Bobby looked about dead on his feet, swaying a little, face grayish, haggard. He had his hat in one hand, a piece of square gauze taped to one side of his forehead. _Concussion_ , Dean thought, and glancing between Bobby and Sam's sleeping form, he wondered if he could already guess what had happened.

When Bobby saw Sam, Dean didn't miss the way that he stiffened. "He asleep?" he asked, gruffly.

"Yeah, think so."

At that, he let out a breath he'd apparently been holding, and said, "Well thank God he's here, at least." But his eyes narrowed at the sight of Dean and the IV line. "What the hell happened to you?" he demanded, concern coloring his words.

"Was gonna ask you the same thing," Dean said, relieved.

"I fell," Bobby said carefully, with a pointed look at the nurse. She was watching the three of them intently, with the air of one seeing the unfolding of film plot that they couldn't quite follow. "Hit my head on the kitchen counter on my way down." He cleared his throat. The intern didn't take the cue.

Dean raised an eyebrow, a little amused despite himself, and then asked her, "Hey, uh, d'you mind if we talk for a few minutes, you know, in private?"

It took her a few seconds to realize he was talking to her. "Oh!" she practically yelped when she got it. "Yeah. Yeah, of course. Sorry." She nodded quickly, her short ponytail bouncing behind her.

"Thanks." Dean smiled.

She flushed and stammered something that sounded vaguely like "Uh…uh h-huh," and left the room.

Bobby watched her go, and then strode over to the bed. "What're you still doin' here? And why didn't ya call?" he asked, eyeing the vitals machine apprehensively. "Did they find somethin'?"

"No," Dean told him. "No, I'm good. Just blacked out when I got here, is all. They kinda doped me up and took my phone."

Bobby's brows shot up. "Why'd you black out? Sure your nose was bleedin', but not _that_ much, right? You got a concussion?"

Dean shook his head, a bit embarrassed. "Nah. I was just kinda running on empty earlier. Been uh, distracted the past few days. Hadn't eaten or gotten much sleep in awhile."

Bobby glared at him. "Well there's your problem," he snapped, then sighed. "Idjit."

Dean grinned sheepishly. "Yeah, fair enough."

"You know better'n to do stupid crap like that," he said, but the words lacked much force or anger. Mostly he sounded tired.

"I know," he said. "Sorry, Bobby."

"Yeah, well," he growled. "Just don't do it again, okay? Lord knows we all got enough shit to deal with without you sabotagin' yourself like that."

Dean bit back a smirk. _Love you too, Bobby._

He inclined his head toward Sam. "When did he get here? _How_ did he get here?"

"About two hours ago, and he has no idea how he got here…Bobby, what the hell happened? I asked him and he said he didn't remember much."

"He doesn't remember?" Bobby asked, spotting one of the swiveling stools clearly intended for an ER doctor sitting in the corner and pulling it closer to the bed, sinking into it with a slight grunt that bespoke sore joints and bruises. "Guess that don't surprise me. He looked outta his mind when he took me down."

"How'd he take you down?" Dean asked, glancing down at Sam, whose head was now tucked against Dean's sheet-covered knee.

"I turned around and he clocked me good with the butt of a sawed-off he'd brought with him from my place," Bobby said, shaking his head in puzzlement. "Don't know what the hell brought it on. Didn't even hear him coming. When I came to, he was gone. Even left the gun behind, which makes no damn sense either."

"God…" Dean muttered. This would make the second time in about six months that Bobby had totally gotten wailed on by Sam. And what was worse, this time it had been _real_ Sam and not Terminator-Sam, even if he wasn't completely in touch with reality right now. And that had to suck. "You okay?" he said, eyeing the gauze on Bobby's forehead.

Bobby shrugged. "Concussion," he said. "Nothin' major." He was staring down at Sam, expression sad and, by the looks of it, more than a little hurt. Sam slept on, oblivious.

"Bobby, he didn't know it was you," Dean told him, for whatever it was worth, which probably wasn't much right now, but _still…_ "I asked him. He wasn't seeing you. He thought he was seeing—who the hell knows what he was seeing back there. Thought you were gone, didn't know where you were. Said he was trapped in the room with a monster or something."

"A monster?" Bobby repeated.

A monster, or worse. "Yeah, I guess."

"Well, least it was nothin' personal this time…" Bobby said in an undertone, voice tinged with bitterness.

"You're right. It wasn't," Dean said, adamant. "He can't reality from Hell right now, Bobby. He didn't mean anything by it."

"I _know_ that," Bobby snapped, but then he sighed. "Look, I ain't holdin' it against him. Ain't his fault. God knows I know that."

They fell silent for a moment, both watching Sam. Sam shifted and muttered unintelligibly into the sterile sheets, then fell still. Dean knew then that Bobby would forgive Sam, of course he would. Even if it'd be harder the second time around. Because that was what family did. But what he did doubt? That Sam would forgive _himself_ once he realized what he'd done to Bobby. As it stood, he was dead sure that every time Sam caught a glimpse of Dean's own swollen nose and bruised eyes for the next several weeks, he'd be in full-on grovel mode, bending over backwards to make sure Dean knew how sorry he was for causing it. That is, if Sam was even coherent enough to be aware of Dean at all… The thought pained him.

"You took the car, right?" Dean asked after awhile.

"Yeah," Bobby said. "Parked out front."

"Were you seein' double out on the road?" Dean asked, frowning, tapping his own forehead.

"It's only a couple blocks from here," he said. "Figured Sam'd come here, so it was the first place I checked. Didn't hear your voicemail 'till I was halfway here and by then you weren't answerin' your phone either."

"Yeah, didn't have mine, and Sam's died," Dean said, holding it up.

Bobby snorted softly. "With our luck? Figures."

"I hear ya," Dean said, rolling his eyes. Sam shifted again, hair sticking up where his head pressed against Dean's leg. "So he walked, I guess."

"Yeah," Bobby said, now serious. "Thank God this town's got sidewalks." He frowned. "So he says he don't even remember walkin' here?"

"No."

Bobby shook his head, looking down at Sam. "Aw, kid…"

"Memory gaps," Dean said, dread constricting his throat. "I don't like this, Bobby."

"I don't either," Bobby murmured, then looked up, expression sad but reassuring. "But we'll take care of him, alright?"

Dean swallowed and nodded.

"Well for starters," Bobby continued, "Let's get you discharged."

So while Bobby went to sort out the headache that was hospital paperwork—and execute a decent enough insurance fraud to cover their asses long enough for them to get long gone from this town—Dean was left with the task of waking Sam. And that was going to be an ordeal in itself. Hopefully he wasn't going to get himself another broken bone to add to the hospital tab in the process, even if they weren't exactly planning on paying it anyway.

He held his breath, bracing himself for the worst, and bent over to ruffle Sam's hair. "Hey," he said softly, then a little louder, "Sam, wake up." When Sam didn't respond, Dean was struck with the sudden, awful thought that maybe he had lapsed back into that terrifying coma state Cas had put him in before.

But his fears of that, at least, proved unfounded, as a few long seconds later, Sam woke with a jolt, a strangled gasp tearing itself from his throat. In one swift movement, he'd launched himself up off the bed, tipping his chair so far back in the process that it lost balance and nearly dumped him backwards onto the floor.

"Whoa, whoa—" Dean caught him by the wrist and yanked him back forward before he fell. "Hey, easy, alright?"

Sam's breath was coming in harsh pants. He was staring blankly down at Dean's hand still wrapped around his wrist. Dean tensed, wondering if he was about to get punched in the face again, but didn't move. "Sam?" he asked, uncertain. "Anybody home?"

Sam didn't answer. Instead, he withdrew his wrist from Dean's grasp, but gently and deliberately rather than violently. He looked up, the blankness in his tired eyes morphing into confusion, followed by a flash of fear, and then settling on hazy recognition. "Hey," he said weakly.

A knot loosened in Dean's chest. He grinned. "Hey."

He rubbed his eyes. "'Wha' happened?" he slurred, stifling a yawn.

Dean smirked. "You fell asleep, princess."

"Fell asleep?" Sam peered blearily around the room.

"Yup," Dean drawled. "Drooled all over my knee and everything."

"Huh?" he muttered. His gaze landed on the sheets covering Dean's leg, and he frowned. "Did not."

Dean didn't know whether to laugh or cry at that. Hell or no Hell, that was Sammy alright. Bitchy, argumentative little brother extraordinaire. "Did too," he said, grin broadening.

Sam huffed but said nothing, eyes taking in the room again as though seeing it for the first time. "Uh…what's going on?"

Dean's heart sank. _Well, easy come easy go…_

"I just told you," he said patiently, smile fading, though he knew he was evading Sam's actual question. "You fell asleep."

"No, that's not…I mean, why're you in the h—" he broke off with a grunt, and suddenly he was bent double in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose with one hand.

"Sammy?"

Nothing.

Dean swore. "Sam!"

Sam hissed, and folded in on himself even more. "Gah…"

Dean scooted forward in the bed towards Sam and reached for his shoulder, but within seconds, Sam had straightened back up, arms wrapped around himself, eyes screwed shut as though against a very bright light.

"Sam? You okay?" Dean asked carefully.

"Yeah," Sam managed, tone clipped. "Remember now…"

"Good," Dean said, though he wasn't sure if that really was good or not, or what exactly it even was that Sam had just "remembered". "You feelin' alright?"

Sam opened his eyes a fraction and met Dean's. "Head hurts," he said tightly.

"Okay. We can have the nurse get you somethin' for that before we leave."

"We're leaving?"Sam murmured. "But…" he squinted. "What about—"

"He's here," Dean said quickly. "And he's fine, dude. Getting me discharged now."

"What…what'd I do to him?" Sam asked slowly.

"He's _fine_ , Sam," Dean said, a little forcefully. _Stop asking._

Sam ignored the cue, anxiety and remorse creeping into his face. "Dean, seriously, what'd I—" But he trailed off, something over Dean's shoulder suddenly catching his attention. Dean turned and looked. There was nothing there. Heart heavy, he turned back to Sam, who was still staring at the spot as though mesmerized.

"What…what's—" Sam started, then gulped.

"Hey," Dean said loudly. "Hey, can I get a little help with this?" he said, raising his unbroken arm with the IV tube taped in place directly into Sam's line of vision. "It's gonna be a bitch to take this out myself." Which was technically a lie, because he could still use the fingers of his opposite hand, but he needed something to grab hold of Sam's attention.

Sam blinked, and his gaze unclouded somewhat. "Huh?"

"The IV, dude."

"Oh." He let out a shaky sigh, eyes refocusing themselves onto the IV line. "Yeah, s-sure." He nodded, head bobbing up and down a bit too rapidly.

Dean extended his arm wrist-upward towards Sam. He allowed himself to be relieved for a moment as he watched Sam slowly peel off the tape and pull out the IV line. It took longer than it should have because his hands were shaking the entire time and he kept losing his grip on the tape, but his brow was furrowed in intense concentration and he was definitely all there, and fighting to stay that way. But when he finally pulled out the line and a large bead of blood immediately welled up on Dean's skin, Sam's breath hitched a little and he looked away.

Dean cleared his throat. "Thanks, man."

"Yeah." Sam was staring at the floor. He fell silent for awhile. Dean started disconnecting the wires that he'd nearly forgotten were attached to his chest beneath the hospital gown, and when a few harried-looking nurse rushed in to find out why all his vitals had suddenly flat-lined, he waved them off, asking for some Tylenol for Sam.

A minute or so later, Sam spoke again. "Hey," he said, still not looking at Dean. "Uh, that girl, you know, earlier? With the…with the b-burns?" he added haltingly. "Is she—"

Dean froze.

_Crap…_

"What girl?" Dean asked calmly after a beat, hoping this lie would help instead of hurt.

Sam's brow furrowed. "The girl," he repeated, "W-with the—" he gestured out towards the hallway where they'd seen her being wheeled past.

"What girl, Sam?" Dean repeated. "What are you talking about?"

Sam looked bewildered. "What do you mean, _what g_ —"

Dean just looked at him, steadily, pretty sure he hated himself for what he was doing here but not sure what other choice he had without getting Sam worked up again.

After a moment, Sam pinched the bridge of his nose again and shook his head as if to clear it. "Oh," he muttered. "Uh, n-never mind, f-forget it. 'S nothing." He looked up. "Can we go now?"

Dean nodded. "Yeah. We can go."

_To be continued_.


	4. Chapter 4

Sam seemed okay as they left the hospital, or at least as okay as could be hoped. As they signed the papers, collected the prescriptions, and drove back to the room, he never once lost track of what was happening around him, and it seemed as though he was putting his best effort into keeping it that way. That wasn't to say he didn't have an edgy, jumpy, even paranoid air—he was hunched in on himself, startled by the slightest movements, eyes darting furtively about his surroundings. But he wasn't hyperventilating, or punching anyone in the face, or running away, so Dean counted that as a win.

But wins, of course, were relative.

When they got back to the room, it was around 1 PM. Dean could tell by the longing look that Bobby gave the nearest bed when they walked in what Bobby needed most right now, and that was rest. Which, he realized grimly, wasn't something that all three of them were really all going to be able to get at the same time. Sam looked far too keyed up to even try to sleep, and had they been able to afford two separate rooms, that wouldn't have been a problem—they could've let Bobby crash in one while Dean stayed up with Sam in the other. As it stood, they were looking at having to sleep in shifts so that Sam could be watched (because he hated to admit it, but after what had happened with Bobby, they couldn't risk not being extra careful), despite the fact that they could all slept at the same time given the room's two beds and comfortable, though admittedly stained and odd-smelling, couch. But Dean felt far too drained to try to work out the logistics of all that now, and the prospect of hot coffee sounded almost as alluring as sleep despite the nurses' warnings to avoid consumption of hot liquids (what did they know, anyway), so he figured he'd see how far their remaining 20 bucks would get them and take Sam out for food. It was killing two birds with one stone, really. He could make sure Sam ate, and give Bobby both the rest he needed and the distance from Sam that he probably wanted. It wasn't that Bobby was not willing to forgive him, because he'd already demonstrated that he was—and Dean suspected that his readiness to forgive probably had something to do with Rufus, and the realization that amnesty among hunters, and friends, really was the best policy—but that didn't mean that getting some space wouldn't do him good.

So Dean did his best to clean himself up in the bathroom while Sam waited for him. He dabbed at the flecks of blood that had made it onto his t-shirt, which wasn't much because his outer shirt had gotten the worst of it and he'd taken that off. But, he figured, it was still probably enough to look sketchy in front of civilians. And the sling he'd put on just so the nurses wouldn't give him a hard time on his way out of the hospital actually covered a lot of it, if he positioned it right. And he had to admit, the thing really did help with the pain of having had his arm reset, even if he kind of felt like a wuss wearing it. Then came those damn stickers on his chest where they'd hooked the vitals monitors, which were always a bitch to try to rip off even when he tried to ease them off with hot water, and even tougher one-handed. He was just glad that he wasn't genetically gifted with all that much to speak of in the chest hair department, or else this would be about five times worse than it was. As to the rest of him—a good look in the mirror confirmed what he already knew. He looked like hell. Blood welled black and purple beneath the skin of his eyelids, his nose red and swollen and sensitive to the touch, the rest of his face pale and gaunt. He needed to shave. And damn, since when did he look this _old_ anyway? But there was nothing he could do about any of that. He splashed some cold water on his face with his good hand and swished some in his mouth, and then headed out the door, Sam, who'd been lingering by the door, following anxiously at his heels.

The single, crappy diner in this town was within walking distance, but in the interest of stretching their money as far as it would go for the time being, Dean opted for a large-ish nearby gas station mini-mart thing instead that had a seating area and some very cheap, albeit not entirely appetizing, meal-type food and baked goods for sale, not to mention coffee. They'd driven there, Sam silent the entire ride with eyes determinedly glued to the dashboard, trembling hands clenched into fists by his sides. Dean had anticipated Sam bitching at him for driving them anyplace right now with only one functional arm and still combating the effects of painkillers, but he didn't. It meant that Sam absolutely knew he couldn't handle driving right now, and thus didn't offer, which was worrisome, given that he'd driven alone last night as well as his usual tendency to be a stubborn ass about things like this.

By the time they reached the gas station, Sam was looking lost again. Dean actually had to take his elbow and steered him across the parking lot, into the mini-mart, and into a booth in the seating area before he could start stuttering out questions about where he was. Part of him had wanted to leave Sam in the car while he got the food so he wouldn't have to deal with being in public right now, but he wasn't about to let him out of his sight either. In retrospect, a drive-through might've been smarter for that reason, but he wasn't so sure if Sam could keep down anything in the way of greasy food at the moment, and he'd probably only pick at a salad if Dean got him one.

"Be right back, okay, Sammy?" he said, when he'd gotten Sam seated. Sam nodded vaguely and stared out the store window. Then, keeping one neurotic eye on the seating area while he shopped, Dean set about the task of finding food that was both cheap and palatable. He himself would eat anything—because for the first time in a long time, actually, he really _was_ hungry right now—but for Sam, with a mind that was projecting Hell onto everything he was seeing, it was going to be way tougher to find food he could try to eat without making himself sick. And Dean knew what that was like from personal experience. He scanned the aisles and walked past the hot food area, mind working, trying not to lose his own appetite in the process of putting his mind in Sam's place. Anything meaty was out. Anything red was out. Anything very spicy was out. Anything too salty or too sweet was out. Hell, anything remotely exciting-tasting was out. He ended up settling on two large-ish cinnamon muffins that were inside a cheap baked-goods display. They looked bland but innocuous, and while not exactly as nutritious as Dean would've liked, it was something. He dumped them on the counter and paid, the process of handing over the cash and accepting the change a little slower than it would otherwise be due to an immobilized arm, and he tried to ignore the fact that one of the salesgirls behind the counter, no more than 17 or 18 years old, was openly staring between him and Sam, who was still huddled over their table on the far side of the store.

They probably looked like criminals, or convicts, he figured, but he figured they also looked beat to hell enough that hopefully these people would pity them and lay off.

He slipped the muffins into the paper bag that, while probably unnecessary for dining in, was helpfully offered by the guy behind the counter and allowed him to carry them both back at the same time. He plopped the bag on the table.

"Back," he announced.

Sam looked up at him and managed a wan smile.

He gestured at the bags. "Well, bon appétit," he said. "Not exactly fine dining here, but these don't look half bad."

Sam eyed the bag without much interest. "Thanks," he said dully.

"Well don't get too excited now," Dean drawled.

"S-sorry," Sam muttered, a bit guiltily, but made no move for the bag.

"You okay?" Dean asked after a second.

Sam shrugged and nodded. All in all it didn't look very convincing.

Of course he wasn't okay.

"You want coffee?" Dean tried.

"Yeah." He went back to scrutinizing the sticky spots on the table.

"Okay. Good. Be right back."

The coffee station was actually pretty decent—one of those like you'd find at a Royal Farms or a Wawa or something with a zillion different pots of flavored coffees sitting on hot plates with a bunch of creamers sitting out over ice. He picked a Brazilian or Columbian or something like that that looked and smelled damn wonderful and _strong_ for himself, and as he poured it black he noticed some bored-looking, freckly, curly-haired preteen kid, whose mom he guessed was the blonde lady over buying the Michelobs at the other end of the store, loitering near him. The kid kept eyeing Dean's coffee when he thought Dean wasn't looking. Heh. Little punk probably wanted to swipe some. Not that Dean could blame him, the smell of it was pretty freaking intoxicating. He'd made Sam some, loading it up with creamer and artificial sweetener (that he'd had to tear open with his teeth) and all the crap that Sam actually thought made it taste better, in the hopes that Sam wouldn't notice he was making him decaf, when he noticed a flaw in his plan. He couldn't carry both up to the counter and then to the table at the same time, and Sticky Fingers here was going to swipe the other cup if he could only get one back at a time. Seeing no solution to the problem, he picked up Sam's cup and left his own, fixing Sticky Fingers with a _do-it-and-die_ glare. Sticky Fingers rolled his eyes. But when he turned around to head to the counter, he nearly ran right into Sam.

…Who looked fully alert, and grinned a little sheepishly when Dean started at the sight of him.

"Need a hand?" he asked Dean, looking pointedly but amusedly at Sticky Fingers, who glared daggers back at Sam.

"Uh, yeah," Dean said, holding up Sam's cup. "This is yours, actually."

"Thanks…" Sam looked down at it and raised an eyebrow. "Is it decaf?"

"Nope," Dean said casually. "Just your regular, pansy-assed stuff, dude."  
Sam snorted. "It's decaf, isn't it." He paused. "D-don't want decaf." His eyes shuttered briefly as he tried to maintain the clarity of his speech, but he still looked otherwise fine.

For the moment.

Dean frowned. "Tough," he said. "Now are you gonna take it or not? You're not takin' mine and I'm not payin' for two here." He held it up again. It wasn't exactly fair of him to do this, but the last thing Sam needed were stimulants messing with his head in addition to everything else.

Sam didn't take it. "Why'd you lie?" he demanded, pinning Dean with a more than mildly accusatory glare.

Dean shrugged, confused at his reaction. "Uh, 'cause you don't need the caffeine in your system right now…"

Sam's eyes narrowed. "D-don't lie to me."

"Sam, it's just coffee," Dean began, puzzled. "Not a big deal."

Sam looked agitated. "No, I mean—" he cut off, glancing at the boy who was watching them curiously, and then sighed. He took the coffee. "Just come on."

"What?" Dean asked, but Sam was already walking towards the register. Dean grabbed his coffee and followed.

They'd almost made it back to the table without incident—Sam had even been the one to pay for the coffee—but only a few feet away from their seats, Sam stopped abruptly. His body went rigid.

"Sam?" Dean looked at his brother, who was staring, transfixed, at their empty booth. His mouth was hanging open, and he looked like he was barely breathing.

"Huh?" he said softly, as though he couldn't quite comprehend what he was seeing.

"Sam," Dean repeated warily. "What is it?"

The coffee tumbled out of Sam's hand and splattered all over the floor, soaking the legs of his jeans.

_Shit..._

_Come on, not here…_

Dean stepped directly in front of Sam, standing in the puddle of coffee at his feet. He resisted the urge to grab Sam's shoulders and shake him to get him to snap out of it, because while would definitely elicit a reaction, it would probably just exacerbate things.

"Sam," he said, firmly. "There's nothing there."

Sam blinked, but didn't look away from the spot.

Dean huffed a sigh and walked over to the table, ignoring Sam's weak, stammered protestation of "D-don't…"

"Look," he said, setting his coffee down then waving his hand in the air over the table and the seats. "There's nothing here, man. I promise. Just you an' me, okay?"

Sam didn't move. "What—"

"Gas station, remember?" He picked up the paper bag with the muffins and brandished it. "Getting food."

It took another long moment, but eventually Sam's shoulders drooped. "Oh… Right." He took a tentative step towards Dean and paused. "Sorry."

"Got nothin' to be sorry for, Sammy. Let's just sit somewhere else, okay?"  
"Okay." Sam looked down, and startled when he noticed Sticky Fingers not far away, squatting on the ground with a few napkins in hand, tying to help clean up the coffee. Dean saw him and flashed a grin, but Sticky Fingers just glowered and flushed a little, obviously displeased and embarrassed at having been caught doing something decent. It also meant he couldn't steal the coffee cup—this place had free refills— off the floor without their noticing. Seeming to realize this, Sticky Fingers picked up the cup, lying empty and on its side in the puddle, and held it up to Sam without meeting his eyes. "Here," he said, voice infused with tween contempt, even if it sounded halfhearted.

Sam shook his head. "S'okay," he muttered, with a strained attempt at a smile. "Keep it."

The kid's face brightened. "Whoa, really?" he asked.

Dean nodded, smirking. "Sure, kid. You better go grab some and chug it down before your mom sees."

"Awesome, thanks!" After giving the coffee on the floor one last swipe of his napkin, he snatched up the cup and dashed over to the coffee station faster than Dean would've thought possible.

Dean rolled his eyes after the kid and then turned back toward Sam. "Did you burn yourself?" he asked, pointing at Sam's coffee-soaked pants and shoes.

Sam looked down at himself, surprised, as though he'd only just now noticed he had hot coffee all over him, then shrugged.

"Guess not?" Dean asked.

Sam shook his head. "No."

"Here," Dean said, handing him the food bag. He went back to the table and grabbed his coffee. "But let's grab a new table, yeah? This one's got a crappy view anyway."

Sam nodded, looking subdued, and let Dean lead him to a new booth by the window.

Neither of them said anything for a long while. Sam just stared out the window and didn't touch his food, even when Dean pulled out his own muffin and started eating it and put Sam's in front of him. It was surprisingly pretty damn good, too, and something he thought Sam could totally handle.

When Dean couldn't take the silence anymore, he said, inclining his head towards the kid who was now stirring sugar packet after sugar packet into his cup at the coffee station, "Hope his mom doesn't come over here and kill us for this. The little punk'll be bouncing off the walls for days."

"Mm-hm," Sam said vaguely.

"You want mine?" Dean said after a moment, nudging his cup towards Sam. Couldn't make things any worse than they already were, when he really thought about it. And heck, maybe caffeine wouldn't be such a bad thing if it was mere tiredness that was lowering Sam's defenses against Hell. They wouldn't know 'till they tried, really. "'S okay it's not decaf, I guess. But just know I'll kick your ass if _you_ start bouncin' off the walls." His tone was trying for levity. He couldn't quite manage it.

Sam glanced at the coffee, then back at Dean, looking as though the prospect of drinking it suddenly made him feel nauseous. "No thanks."

"Alright," Dean said, not liking that answer. "More for me, I guess."

Sam's gaze returned to the cup and lingered there. He said nothing for a good few seconds, looking intensely thoughtful. Then, "You lied." His voice was hollow, but the words held all the weight of an accusation.

Dean bit back a surge of disappointment. He was pretty sure Sam's rationality must be trickling away again, because if he was this upset over some stupid cup of coffee… "Yeah, I know, I'm sorry," he said tiredly. "But it's just coffee, dude, it's not a big—"

"No," Sam cut him off. "The girl."

"What?" Dean said. Sam just looked at him, _you-know-exactly-what-I'm-talking-about_ written all over his face.

It took a few seconds for it to finally click in Dean's exhausted brain what it was that Sam _was_ talking about, but when he got it, his stomach dropped. "Sam…"

"The girl with the burns," Sam said slowly, though he could almost certainly tell Dean knew what he was talking about now. "She was real. She w-was real, wasn't she."

Dean sighed, exasperated. "It doesn't matter, Sam."

"It matters," he said, eyes now strangely intense. "Believe me, it m-matters."

"How'd you even know?" Dean asked, knowing he shouldn't be surprised that even in this state, Sam could work out when he was being lied to, and not knowing if that was a good thing. Because before they'd left, when Sam had left to be shown to an ER restroom, Dean had _told_ that damn intern not to mention the girl again…

"Two nurses. Talking…about her, on the way back from the bathroom."

Shit. He didn't know if he should be grateful or not that Sam had been that receptive to his surroundings at the time. He'd certainly done nothing to show it—he'd needed a nurse to walk him there and back because he'd gotten confused and disoriented again—but clearly _some_ part of his brain was still able to track the situation and put two and two together. And that was good.

Even if it meant Sam was looking at him right now as if he'd been betrayed.

Dean felt a headache building somewhere behind his eyes. The pressure made his whole face hurt. "It's not important," he said, his tone belying his dwindling patience. Dwindling, and fast, because as much as he knew that right now Sam more than deserved all the patience and understanding Dean could give him and much more besides, he was so freaking _tired_ he couldn't see straight, without a clue how to begin to fix any of this. And whether Sam agreed or not, he'd done the right thing about the girl, and Sam could just shut the hell _up_ about it.

Sam shook his head. He grabbed a small stack of napkins from the wire basket on the table and began, methodically, to tear them up into long strips, but his eyes never left Dean's. "It's important," he said. "It's really—" he ripped the napkin— "really—" _rip_ — "important."

"Why?" Dean asked, exasperation finally claiming him as he watched Sam destroy the napkin. "The girl's gonna be okay, Sam. They said so," Dean continued. "So _why_ does it matter?"

And then, as if something had snapped inside him, Sam flung the napkin pieces away and slammed his fist down hard on the table. "Because I _can't fucking tell_ what's _real_ anymore!" his voice exploded. Several heads turned their way. The words shocked and cut into them both like shrapnel—Sam even looked astonished at himself for uttering them. In the silence that followed, they could only just look at each other, Sam breathing hard and Dean just staring dumbly back at him.

Sam actually managed to collect himself before Dean did. He shut his eyes and let out a long, shaky breath, then picked up one of the strips of napkin he'd torn and began to twist it in his fingers, now studiously avoiding Dean's gaze.

Dean had to gulp a few times before he could manage to get any words out at all. He reached over to tug at the mangled piece of napkin. "Sam, listen—"

"No, you listen." Sam's head snapped up without warning, his demeanor entirely changed once more, eyes almost feverishly bright. "Since I woke up, _everywhere_ I look, and everything I…I see…" he trailed off, jaw working. "I look at Bobby, a-at you…Do you know what I _saw_ when I looked at Bobby?" His voice was rapid, but strained. "Last night, b-before I almost bashed his brains out?"

Dean shook his head. "Sam…" His voice sounded almost like a warning. He didn't even know what he was trying to warn him against, really. _Dangerous territory, don't think about that_? Really, how could he _not_ think about it? He didn't even know if Sam keeping his memories to himself would make a lick of difference at this point, anyway—they still had free reign over him. His brain was still gonna be Hell's playground.

Either way, Sam was talking again, words tumbling out like he couldn't stop them if he tried. "I r-remember now. I don't…I can't even…It definitely wasn't Bobby b-back there. Not to me. And you?" He laughed humorlessly. "The only r-reason I can still t-tell that it's you, _some_ of the t-time, m-more 'n Bobby at least and it's only b-been less than _twelve hours_ , is 'cause they liked using you. A-against me. A hundred seventy fucking years an' I n-never forgot what you looked like. Even when I f-forgot everybody else. Never f-forgot you. They made sure I didn't."  
Dean felt his stomach revolt at that. Because even if his own time in Hell had been a cake walk compared to Sam's, _that_ was among the worst, if not _the_ worst thing Alastair put him through, and frequently, was making himself look like Sam while he carved Dean up.

Few things break a person quite like that.

"God," he choked out. "God, Sam, I'm not gonna hurt you." Even if Dean couldn't think of a single damn thing to say to the rest of this, that much he needed to make clear. Especially if Sam had spent only less than 30 years of his life with the real him, and a whole _century and a half_ with some demented version of Dean that wanted nothing more than to torment him in every way and on every level imaginable. And Dean suddenly realized why Sam couldn't abide Dean touching him.

"I know," Sam said, his voice cracking. "'S how I know I'm out. G-gotta keep telling myself…" He blinked rapidly, to no avail, against forming tears.

Dean nodded. It was all he could do. He wasn't even sure he remembered how to breathe anymore.

"That," Sam continued, "And…and Death. I remember Death. He was…bright," he said, his brow furrowing as if this surprised him. "R-really bright. Brighter than L-lucifer and Michael both. And, uh," unbelievably, he gave a small, watery smile. "And it really _hurt_."

Despite the fact that it wasn't something he really found all that amusing, Dean smiled back, though it may have been more of a grimace. "Yeah, I bet."

"B-but even then," Sam said quickly, tears now streaming unchecked down his face, "When I'm _seeing_ stuff and…and _feeling_ stuff, it's really d-damn hard to remember. Remember I'm out. And everything in my head is all right in front of me a-and I'm _terrified_ and I just _need to know what's real_ , okay?"

Shell-shocked, Dean nodded. "Okay." It was barely more than a whisper.

Sam leaned forward over the table, eyes suddenly hard. "Promise me," he demanded, the desperation in his tone leaving no room for argument. "Don't lie again. _Promise_ me."

"I promise."

Dean finished his coffee in silence. He couldn't even taste it anymore, barely noticed the way the heat of it made his nose throb. Sam had stopped ripping up napkins. Eyes dull, he looked empty, drained. As if the effort it cost him to make his admissions about Hell had sapped both his strength and his presence of mind. Dean was pretty sure that were he to shove Sam right now, however lightly, Sam would fall over and probably not get back up.

And that also almost certainly had more than a little to do with the fact that Sam's food still lay untouched before him.

And that, Dean realized with a jolt, was the one damn thing about this entire situation that he _could_ fix.

He nudged the no-longer-warm muffin an inch or so closer to Sam. "You should eat something, Sammy."

Sam didn't move, didn't acknowledge he'd spoken.

_Not good._

" _Sam_ ," he repeated.

When Sam finally did seem to realize Dean was talking to him, the awareness returning to him looked like somebody resurfacing after a deep sleep. He blinked his now-red-rimmed eyes a few times, sluggishly, focused on Dean. "Mm?"

"Eat something. It's getting cold, dude."

Sam shook his head minutely. When he looked down at the muffin, he grimaced, and Dean could've sworn he'd gone a shade greener at the sight of it.

Dean suppressed a surge of irritation at Sam's lack of cooperation, because even though he knew it wasn't fair, especially after everything Sam had just told him, but it had literally been days—unless he'd managed to make himself stop and eat on the road to Bootback, which Dean doubted but hoped—and Sam was going to kill himself if he kept this up. And even though he was the last person who should be nagging anybody about getting enough to eat right now, again, this was the one way in this whole fucked up mess that he could think of to help take care of his brother right now.

"Come on, Sammy, you gotta be starving by now."

Sam shrugged, noncommittal.

" _Don't_ tell me you're not hungry at all right now. That's bullshit." Now Dean did sound annoyed, and he wished he didn't, but helplessness tended to infuriate him like nothing else could, and _damn_ but being tired and hurt just made it all that much worse.

"I can't," Sam muttered.

"Try."

Sam pushed the food away. "'M sorry," he rasped, now definitely looking ill. "I can't."

" _Goddamn it,_ Sam, just _eat_ already," Dean growled before he could stop himself, shoving the rejected food back at Sam.

And he couldn't have regretted it more.

Because in the very next second, something seemed to shift in Sam's eyes when he looked back at Dean, like something had broken inside him. They were flat and lifeless again. And all of a sudden he was seizing the muffin, robotically tearing it into chunks, and stuffing them into his mouth, as fast as humanly possible, like his life depended on it.

Dean just watched him eat, mouth hanging slightly open, something horrible twisting in his gut. Because yeah, he was eating, but what the _hell_ …

This was wrong.

But Sam just kept on going, head bowed, apparently not caring that he was getting crumbs all over his face and clothes and the table or that he was chewing with his mouth open, as though it didn't matter in the least who was watching.

As though he didn't even have a capacity for shame anymore.

It was when he started choking a little that Dean finally stopped him. "Sam. _Sam_." He grabbed the remaining pieces of the muffin away from him, and snatched the piece he was about to stuff into his overfull mouth out of his hands. "Stop."

Sam just looked at him, uncomprehending. He swallowed.

"That's enough, okay?" Dean said quietly, handing him a napkin.

Sam took it, stiffly, eyes widening in horror as if he'd only just realized what had happened. He nodded.

"You alright?" Dean asked, somehow sure this was all his fault.

Sam nodded again. He looked faint. "S-sorry," he breathed. "Force of habit."

"Force of—" Dean repeated, bewildered. Then he got it. "Oh."

The realization was like a knife to the heart.

Because he remembered all too well.

Dean had learned the hard way, down _there_ , that there was no point in resisting or fighting back if you were told to do something.

And what that had to do with _eating…_

Well, he could think of a few things. Could remember, with horrible clarity, a few things.

Like, for example, that no person should be forced to experience the taste of their own entrails.

_God, Sammy. What did they do to you?_

Sam tried, with badly shaking hands, to brush the crumbs off his face and clothes. He'd gone bone-white.

"Hey, it's okay, it's okay," he said, when Sam clamped a hand over his mouth to stifle a sob. "Let's get outta here, huh?"

Sam nodded, but the motion made him gag.

" _Don't_ throw up," he said, though it came out more forceful than he'd meant it to. He hated to issue Sam an order of any kind after what had just happened, but the one good thing that had come out of it, however convoluted and twisted it was for him to be grateful for it, was that Sam had finally gotten some food in his system. And Dean was determined for it to _stay_ in his system.

Sam swallowed convulsively a few times, hand still clamped over his mouth, and nodded, miserably.

"That's good," Dean said, soothingly as he could, though he felt sick himself. "You're okay. You're doing great, Sammy."

Sam just gagged again, screwing his eyes shut.

But he kept his promise not to throw up his food.

At least not until they got back to the motel.

_To be continued_


	5. Chapter 5

An hour later and Dean was getting the distinct feeling that this was one of the many times in his and Sam's lives that for every step forward, they were taking two steps back. The realization was eating at him as he tried, one-armed, to hold Sam up so that his head didn't fall into the toilet water as his system brutally expelled every last bit of what he'd eaten at the gas station and then some, and then gotten slammed hard against the dingy bathroom wall for his efforts.

Dean laid there on the freezing tiles for a second, too stunned to move and seeing stars popping at the edge of his vision. In the back of his mind he marveled at the fact that Sam had whipped around that fast and caught Dean by surprise in the midst of puking his guts out. Oh, and his _the-universe-is-cosmically-fucking-with-us_ theory was given even more credence in the fact that the deafening crash of him being thrown into a wall—which was probably going to get them complaints from the middle-aged couple staying in the room above them—had not even managed to wake Bobby up. Especially when a second later, Sam collapsed onto the floor right next to him, twitching, body racked with violent shivers.

"Shit," Dean growled, propping himself up on his good elbow to get a better look at Sam and biting back bile himself at the feeling that his head was going to explode. He doubted he had a concussion, but he'd knocked it good against the wall, and the sharp throbbing from his nose seemed to have spread to the rest of his head. Even the fairly dim bathroom light made his eyes water as he tried to focus on Sam…

…Who looked, for all the world, like he was having a seizure.

_That_ jolted Dean back into action.

"No," Dean muttered, vaulting himself into a crouching position and bending over Sam's shuddering body. "No, no, no, come _on_ …"

His eyes were wide and glazed, seemingly staring through the ceiling rather than at it. His lips were forming a silent stream of words, fingers opening and closing around nothing at his sides.

Dean stared down at him, numb horror mounting. It only took a second's hesitation this time before he decided he didn't care at this point about whatever the repercussions of touching Sam were or how it made Sam feel, just wanting to bring him _back_ , and carded a hand through Sam's sweat-matted hair. "Come on, man." He shook his head, throat nearly closing up at the effort of forcing the words out. "You can't check out on me now. Not again."

But then, unexpectedly, Sam's eyes rolled to focus on his face, and he blinked. "'M not," he slurred.

"Sam?" it came out as a near-sob of relief.

"Mhmm." His eyes closed. The creases of tension on his forehead disappeared and his face relaxed.

"Whoa, whoa, don't sleep yet," Dean said quickly, tapping his cheek. Sam grunted a little in annoyance but opened his eyes. "You okay?" he asked.

"Y-yeah," Sam managed, then yawned, and muttered something Dean couldn't understand.

"What?"  
"S-said…'s not…seizure," Sam said, glancing blearily around himself and up at Dean. Dean's mouth opened and closed, taken aback but immensely grateful that even in his current state Sam had been able to follow his train of thought enough to reassure him, to recognize from his actions and Dean's reaction what it must have looked like to Dean, what it must've reminded him of. "Jus'…tired," he finished, eyes sliding closed again. "Got…confused."

Dean sighed. Okay, so not a seizure then. Or at least not one of _those_ seizures.

But being sleep-deprived and disoriented were clearly doing a number on him, waking nightmares aside, and hunger and probable dehydration weren't helping matters much either. He was going to get himself sick at this rate, Dean thought as he took in the sheen of sweat coating pallid skin. And that was the last thing any of them needed right now.

And that was something he was determined to prevent.  
Resolute, he pushed himself up from the floor, wincing as his battered body protested the motion. "Be right back, okay? Will you be alright here for a sec?"

"Mhmm…" Sam squinted up at him against the harsh fluorescent lights. "Dean?"

"Yeah, Sammy?"

"Did I hurt you?" He frowned. "Don' remember…"

Dean took a long, deep breath and let it out before answering.

_Don't lie to me._

_I need to know what's real._

He shrugged, trying for nonchalance. "Eh, it's okay. You kinda just pushed me backwards is all. 'M not hurt."

"Oh…" Remorse crept into his features. "'M sorry," he murmured.

"Dude, it's okay. Really," Dean told him, not sure it was going to help but sure Sam needed to hear it anyway. "You didn't mean to. Not your fault."  
Sam's expression didn't change. If anything, he just looked more miserable.

"Let me go grab something. I'll be back in a second, alright?"

Sam nodded mutely, eyes drifting to the grubby wall tiles.

In about half a minute, Dean was back in the bathroom, the bottle of Gatorade he'd bought before they'd left the gas station—of the innocuously-colored pale blue variety so that he wouldn't balk at the sight of it—and was down on his knees again next to Sam, who hadn't moved. "Hey," he said, bringing the bottle into Sam's line of vision. "Hey, you thirsty?"

"Not for that," Sam said, voice hoarse and weak. He gulped. "W-water."

"Come on, man, water's lame," Dean said. "Now if you ask me, Gatorade—" he opened the battle—"is much more badass than water."

Sam's lips twitched at that, but he didn't say anything.

"Would you try, at least?" he asked, more serious. "You could use it right now. We don't want you getting sick on us."

Sam grimaced, but he relented. "'Kay…"

Dean wasn't sure whether to be relieved or worried by the fact Sam had given in so fast, even if he'd asked rather than demanded this time, but didn't let himself dwell on it. "Here," he said, pressing it into Sam's hand. "You want help?" he asked, not sure if Sam could even coordinate lifting his head and holding the bottle at the same time. He certainly hadn't made any move to sit up. Sam nodded, and Dean slid a hand behind his neck to hold his head up while Sam held the bottle in both hands. He looked nauseated the second it touched his lips, and Dean realized that the taste of Gatorade was probably more sickly-sweet than Sam could handle right now, but it was all they had. "Don't think about it, Sammy," he muttered when he felt Sam's neck muscles cord under his hand and saw him shaking his head. "Don't think about it. Just drink it, okay? Can you do that for me?"

Sam's eyes watered but his head bobbed up and down slightly.

He ended up gulping down about half the bottle before he couldn't take it anymore and slammed it down next to him. He was making a visible effort to keep himself calm, his eyes shuttered and his breathing shallow.

"Alright, buddy, alright," Dean said, praising, lowering his head back down and praying he wasn't going to throw it all up again. "You did awesome. Let's get you to bed, huh?"

"That'd be nice," Sam said unexpectedly through gritted teeth, and startled, Dean laughed.

Hauling Sam to his feet was a near-Herculean task, and by the time they'd managed it, Dean honestly wasn't sure whose knees were more likely to buckle as he half-dragged Sam over to the bed that was unoccupied by a snoring Bobby. But they made it, and Sam didn't throw up on the way, so mission accomplished.

Sam managed to kick his own shoes off and get himself under the blanket, which was good, because all Dean could manage to do by that point was drag a chair over to the side of his bed and all but fall into it, completely spent.

About two minutes later and it looked like Sam was drifting off—and Dean was fighting not to drift off himself. But Sam's eyes opened a fraction, and his brow furrowed. "Oh…"

"What?" Dean asked drowsily, pushing himself upright in his chair.

"Need…r-restraints."

"No, you don't," Dean said smoothly, though the words were a dull blow. It was massively fucked up, really, that this was definitely not the first time in Sam's life that he'd said that. "I'm watching you. You're okay."

"B-but you're not," Sam pressed, sitting up a little. "No offense but y-you look like crap…and if you fall asleep—"

"Not gonna fall asleep," Dean said, sincerely hoping he was right about that.

Sam looked skeptical. "You look like…you're a-about to pass out."

Dean rolled his eyes. "Back at you."

Sam ignored that. "N-not saying you'll fall asleep, but if you do, I d-don't want to hurt you an' Bobby," he said, earnestly, casting an anxious glance over at Bobby's bed.

"You won't," Dean said tiredly.

"You don't know that." He looked away.

"You didn't at the hospital."

"Yeah, f-for the whole _hour_ I was asleep." Sam shook his head, eyes darkening. "Look, I…h-h-hurt you both already, and w-we were _all_ awake. D-don't wanna hurt you again. _Please."_ There was a tremor in his voice he couldn't suppress.

And all it took to convince Dean was that broken plea. He huffed a sigh but nodded. "Okay." He looked around the room. "Not sure what we can use—"

"Next t-to the TV," Sam said. Dean turned around and looked. Lying next to the TV set on the dresser were an uncomfortably familiar pair of handcuffs and pair of shackles, both padded. From Bobby's house, their intended use was to restrain victims of a possession during an exorcism. But Dean recognized them as what they'd used on Sam the first few days that they'd let Sam out of the panic room after Famine and settled him in a spare bedroom. He'd still been having scattered nightmares and daytime hallucinations at that point, but when Dean couldn't take listening to his screams for help from the other side of the panic room door anymore they'd relocated him. Sam must've grabbed the restraints before he left Bobby's this time, must've known what he was going to be in for. Getting them onto Sam one-handed was a bitch, even with Sam helping him. Of course, Sam wasn't helping him the entire time. One minute, he was helping lock cuffs into place with an expression of shame on his face that Dean was tempted to deck him for—because how long was it going to take to get it through his head that none of this in the least was his fault—and the next, when Dean had moved onto the shackles around his ankles, he was staring, mesmerized, over at the dark space that was the bathroom behind its partially closed door.

"Sam…" Dean began, recognizing that expression, as he finished locking the shackles into place.

Sam's eyes flicked to his face, but there was no spark of recognition. Only fear.

And that was when he began to struggle, uselessly, against the bonds. "No," he was muttering. "No…no, let me go…" Dean planted a hand in the center of his chest to keep him still, afraid that he was going to flip himself off the bed if he kept this up. That only made Sam struggle harder. Dean pressed down, though, and Sam, too exhausted to keep on resisting for all that long, eventually went limp.

"Just try to go to sleep, okay?" Dean told him, practically falling back into his chair.

Sam's eyes had already closed.

Sam really was too wiped out to do much more than mutter, twitch, and occasionally cry out in his sleep. It was pretty damn heartbreaking to watch, but still, it was comparatively a lot calmer than he'd been, like the eye of some kind of hurricane. And despite himself, though he'd been consciously resisting it and all but pinching himself to stay alert, Dean proved Sam right by slumping forward onto the bed and falling asleep.

Some time later, he was nudged awake by Bobby, standing over him and telling him that he'd take over watching Sam, and telling him to take the other bed. All he remembered before he was out again was the digital clock reading 4:15 PM, the sight of Sam still fast asleep, and Bobby forcing some of his prescription painkillers and a glass of water on him.

He didn't wake again until late that night. And when he did, he felt like crap.

Friggin' Vicodin.

He sat up groggily and blinked around the room. Sam was still asleep, and Bobby nowhere to be found. Groggily, Dean pushed himself up off the bed, grimaced as the instantaneous throbbing in his nose and arm set his teeth on edge, and stumbled over to the window. All the while, his stomach threatened to empty itself all over the floor, and he swallowed several times to prevent just that. _Damn_ , he hated Vicodin.

He peeled back the curtain and glanced out into the motel parking lot, darkening sky lit up by harsh orange street lamps, moths flitting in and out of their electric glow. Bobby was there, out by the rental car, pacing back and forth as he spoke on his cell to somebody. He seemed agitated.

Dean turned back towards the room, resisting a nearly overwhelming urge to head right back to the bed, flop back down, and sleep for a month. Instead, he opted to check on Sam. No changes there, as he soon realized. Sam was still in the midst of the same restless sleep as earlier. If anything, he looked slightly worse off than before, physically at least, his face flushed and sweaty. Fever, maybe.

Great.

Dean didn't check to confirm it, for fear he'd wake Sam up, but he could tell. If only because their lives were an exquisite example of Murphy's Law in action, he knew—it figured Sam would get sick on top of every-frickin-thing else. But even though it made him want to punch the wall, because a fever was bound to make it about fifty times harder for Sam to distinguish reality from memory than it already was, Dean knew the cause of it was most likely simply burnout. And that could be fixed with rest, fluids, and maybe some actual _food_.

As Dean watched, Sam's brow knit and he shifted, his wrists subconsciously pulling against the cuffs. But he didn't wake.

When Bobby finally came back in, Dean was lying on his bed and staring at the cracks in the ceiling, vaguely thinking that a shower might be nice but not caring to expend the effort it would take to get up and drag himself to the bathroom. He scratched at the skin where his cast ended, just above his elbow, having forgotten just how damn _itchy_ these damn casts could be. When the door opened and closed, he pushed himself upright with some effort and saw Bobby step in, slip the phone into his pocket, and lock the door behind him.

"Hey," Dean said.

"Hey yourself," he said, double checking the bolt. "How're you doin'?"

Dean shrugged. "Alright. You?"

"Been better," was the monotone reply. Bobby eased himself down into a chair with a slight groan.

"You're head bothering you?"

"That ain't all." Bobby looked grim, staring at the carpet.

"What's wrong?" Dean asked, standing up.

Bobby exhaled long and hard before answering. "Well I called around, tryin' to muster up contacts, see if we can't get us some help with a tow for your car. And we're pretty darn near the border of the state, so I figured Kansas City was the best place to look. Well it turns out I only got one contact in Kansas City…" His eyes hardened. "And it turns out she's dead. Six months ago."

"What?" Dean asked. "Who?"

"Marie Milburn," he said, shaking his head. "Woman was a real hardass, I'll tell ya. Made _Ellen_ look warm an' fuzzy by comparison. But a damn good hunter, and the reason hunters never find much work around the Kansas City area. She kept a good lid on things."

"What happened to her?"

"A _hydra_ , of all things, if you can believe it," Bobby said, incredulous.

"Oh, I believe it," Dean scoffed, disgusted. "What with that Mother-bitch bringing all her ugliest little bastards out to play."

"Ugly, and extinct," Bobby said. "Last account of one of those is literally straight outta the Hercules legend. But apparently the things can get by just fine living in sewer systems and nabbing people off the streets through the gutters."

"Damn," Dean muttered, wondering just how many other hunters had been wasted during Eve's rampage. "Sorry 'bout your friend."

Bobby snorted. "Well 'friend' is a strong word in this case, but she was good at what she did, I'll give her that. Didn't deserve to go out the way she did."

Dean nodded.

"Talked to her son, though," Bobby went on. "James Milburn. Kid ain't no hunter himself. Pharmacist, actually, but he knows a thing or two. He's gonna see if he can't dig up some of Marie's old contacts for us in the city to help us out. He's still got the keys to her old place and all. And if not," he shrugged, a slightly devious gleam in his eye, "Figure it's a big enough city that a bribe here and there or, uh, the _borrowin'_ of a tow truck ain't exactly gonna make front page news."

Dean chuckled. "Sounds good. Don't get arrested."

Bobby nodded. "Wouldn't dream of it."

"But thanks for taking care of this," Dean said, and sincerely. The logistics of towing the car back to Bobby's place, and the logistics of anything else for that matter, were beyond him right now.  
"Don't mention it." He paused, looking over at Sam. "Looks like you're gonna have your hands full while I'm gone as is."  
"You two gonna be alright here?" he asked. "Won't be gone more than a few days, and I'll head back to Bootback tonight and see if I can't crack open that trunk and get your bags out first."

"Yeah. Thanks, Bobby." And it was the best possible scenario, really—Bobby would be helping them out in a huge way, for which Dean would owe him bigtime, but in a way that meant he wouldn't have to be in close quarters with Sam. And that was probably better for both Bobby and Sam right now, eliminating the _sorry-I-tried-to-kill-you-again_ tension which was just going to make them both miserable, forgiveness or no.

But at the same time, that left Dean to handle Sam on his own.

…Leaving Sam stuck with the one person whose face had been used against him for a century and a half.

…Awesome.

Ironically, the one person Dean could think of whose help they could really, really use in a situation like this was the one person who'd gotten them into this mess in the first place.

And when the power buzz of a zillion souls finally wore off of him— _if_ it wore off—Cas was gonna be hard pressed to give Dean one good reason not to kill him the next time they came face to face. Because Cas might not have been in his right mind when he'd declared himself God, but he certainly had been when he'd as good as destroyed Sam.

A little voice in his head was telling him otherwise—that getting rid of Cas if he ever became no longer a virtually nuclear threat to the planet wasn't going to solve anything, and if anything, killing a friend was just going to make everything suck even more than it did—and that voice sounded an awful lot like Sam's voice.

He chose to ignore it.

When Bobby left for Bootback at around 10PM, Sam still hadn't woken up. Dean kind of hoped he wouldn't until the next morning, and by then hopefully the fever would be gone. He sat on the edge of Sam's bed, wondering what to do in the meantime, and knowing that if he thought too far in advance, he was going to make himself crazy.

One step at a time.

Right, then.

Bathe, before Sam woke up. That he could do.

They didn't have the cash to get themselves food, at least not until Bobby returned with Dean's wallet. Not a whole lot there, but at least enough to get them by for a few days. And thank God Sam had nagged him into replenishing the emergency cash stuffed in the glove compartment last time he'd gotten lucky in a poker game, even if it wasn't a huge amount either, or else they wouldn't be able to afford the room after tonight. His current fake credit card was close to maxed out, so that wasn't going to be much of a help.

So yeah. Bathe, sit tight, maybe watch TV, hope Sam stays asleep, deal with whatever comes if he wakes up. He could handle that.

He hoped he'd still be able to handle it with Bobby gone, even it was necessary.

Because Bobby would be fifty miles away, in a different state, leaving them with no car, little money, fevers, delusions, and inconveniently broken bones in the meantime.

Kansas City, Missouri was practically still in Kansas, so it wasn't like he was _that_ far, but still.

Missouri.

_Missouri…_

And then Dean had an idea.

Ten minutes later found Dean leaning in the doorway, staring out at the dry weeds that grew at the edge of the crumbling asphalt of the parking lot, phone to his ear.

"Hi, uh, Missouri? This is Dean Winchester."  
  
***  


"Worry dolls?" Sam asked, raising a skeptical eyebrow down at the paper bag Dean had tossed in his lap.

"Not worry dolls, dude," Dean said. "Mayan trouble dolls."  
  
"Same thing." He peered into the bag.  
  
It was the next evening, and Bobby had already left for Kansas City, but not before letting Dean slip out for an hour to pick up the things Missouri had told him to buy. He hadn't wanted to leave him—Sam had been having a _very_ bad day, feverishness causing his already scattered awareness to disintegrate further. After much cajoling, in one of his more lucid moments Dean had gotten him to eat a bit of soup and take some Tylenol, but not much else besides. He'd spent much of the time lying in the bed and staring around the room, eyes terrified and bright with fever, chest rising and falling with rapid, shallow pants. When he'd first woken up, he'd held it together long enough to warn Dean not to take off the restraints, and if the hostile gleam in his eyes when he looked at Dean and Bobby after his mind had slipped back into Hell was any indication, Sam had been absolutely right about that.

He was talking, too—muttering things that made no more sense than his earlier talk about "the _other one_ ," interspersed other things that made all too much sense, terrible sense. There were a lot of "no"s and "please"s, and as if those weren't heartbreaking enough, what really got to Dean were the occasional, broken whispers of "Adam."

Damn it all.

He should've expected that, but it made it no easier to hear. Dean had consciously chosen Sam over Adam when Death had asked him which brother to save, and he'd do it again a hundred times over, but that didn't mean he didn't bear the weight of that decision, the knowledge that the brother he'd never known who had only made it to nineteen, and a complete innocent at that, was burning in the darkest depths of Hell. And it was all on Dean. And what was worse? Sam had technically known Adam for five times the number of years that Dean had even been _alive_ , even if it was in Hell. And if Sam ever found out that Dean had opted to save him instead of Adam, which he sincerely hoped he wouldn't, he wasn't sure Sam would ever forgive him for it. Or maybe he would, because he'd have to understand that of course that'd have been Dean's decision, but Dean could guarantee that he still wouldn't be able to grasp the concept that he deserved a second chance at life every bit as much as Adam did. Because that was the way that Sam's mind worked. But if he'd been in Sam's place, having witnessed whatever Adam was going through firsthand, he wasn't so sure he wouldn't feel the exact same way.

As it stood, Dean knew he needed to not speak about Adam with Sam unless Sam initiated it. He wasn't sure either of them could handle it.

But, unbelievably, the worst part of all this wasn't listening to Sam cry out for Adam. It was the moment, shortly before he'd left to get the things on Missouri's list, that Sam had suddenly fixed Dean with a glare full of pure hatred. "You stop wearing his face, you bastard," he'd snarled. "You have no right."

Dean had just kind of stood there for a moment, pretty sure his mouth was hanging open and slack, staring back at Sam as Sam mutinously struggled against the bonds. Dean had stood rooted to the spot, vaguely thinking it was sort of a miracle that his legs were still holding him up, until Bobby nudged him in the direction of the door, expression sad, and told him he'd better get going for those supplies. He'd nodded, cleared his throat, and left as quickly as he could.

But now that he was back and Bobby was gone, Sam was actually looking better. He looked bewildered— and Dean wondered how much of the day he actually remembered—and the fever didn't seem to have gone away, but Dean was able to sit on his bed without spooking him and actually hold his attention when they talked. He'd even taken the cuffs off him, which Sam didn't protest, and he only looked askance at things around the room that weren't really there once every minute or so. But despite that, he still seemed able to listen. And that left Dean nearly lightheaded with relief.

Right now he was dumping the contents of the paper bag onto his lap and sifting through this, looking confused. "Toothpicks, embroidery floss, beads, ribbon, h-hot glue gun…Where d-did you get all this?" He was still stuttering, and Dean briefly wondered if that was going to be a permanent fixture in Sam's speech from now on.

"Craft store," Dean said, cringing. "And dude, let me tell ya, I am never going into a place like that again. It was like Martha Stewart threw up in there." Truth be told, he hadn't had a clue how to navigate the damn store either—it wasn't very big, but he was immediately lost among the rolls of yarn, bolts of fabric, doilies, obnoxiously colorful feathers, gaudy beads, birdhouses, and silk flowers. Not to mention friggin' humiliated to be there at all. Seriously, if a person could die of cutesy overkill… It wasn't until some matronly saleslady took pity on the fact that he was obviously out of his element that he actually managed to find the things he needed, after he'd spun her some lie about having a son in kindergarten who was working on an art project for school. She was helpful enough that he almost felt a bit bad for having walked out without actually buying any of it. But it wasn't like he'd get caught, anyhow, with years upon years of experience.

"How'd you pay f-for it?"

Dean just smiled.

"You didn't, d-did you?"

"Nope."

Sam rolled his eyes, but said nothing else about it. He stared down at the supplies in his lap. "So…worry dolls?" he repeated.

"Yup."

"A-and Missouri thinks they'll help me?"

"Yeah, she does." Dean tried to sound confident. "Look, they're real easy to make, and Missouri makes 'em herself and gives them to people that really need 'em, so why not try it, huh?"

"What do they do?"

"Well nothing, without the right incantation. Which I have."  
Sam wasn't buying it. "Dean, this is toothpicks and string a-and glue."

"That's the point, man. It's a kitschy story for Mexican tourists, but you know the legend, right? The Mayans were dirt poor, so they made the dolls out of whatever crap they had lying around. Sticks and string and stuff. Then they had the shaman or whatever they called it lay some pretty powerful mojo on 'em, and voila, you got yourself a handful of powerful little bastards to stick under your pillow and—"

"And ward off bad dreams," Sam finished, now holding up the box of multicolored toothpicks and staring at it curiously.

"Well yeah. They're meant to trap negative and harmful energy and, like, siphon it away from you and channel it back into the universe, or something," he explained. "Sounded like hippie bullshit to me at first too, but Missouri says the little suckers really work. Apparently it was a pain in the ass for her to track down the words to the incantation, but it's the real deal. She doesn't ever give it out, like _ever_ , but she made an exception 'cause apparently you're entitled if you save the world. Like friggin' Superman, dude," he added fondly. "Or maybe Spiderman, actually," he added as an afterthought, enjoying Sam's flustered and slightly pained expression at the comparison. "I think you're more of a Peter Parker than a Clark Kent type, really."

Sam looked amused and shook his head, then paused. "So they work?" he actually looked a bit hopeful now.

Dean nodded. "Yeah. And you know how I know?"

"How?"  
  
"Because I had some when I was real little, do you remember? Dad gave 'em to me."

Sam scrunched his forehead, trying to remember. "Oh yeah," he said, and he grinned. "Didn't you throw 'em out the car w-window when y-you were like 8 b-because you said you weren't a girl so you weren't gonna p-play with dolls?"

Dean grinned back. "Yeah. Dad was so pissed and we couldn't figure out why, remember? Now I know why." His smile faded a bit. "Turns out Missouri made 'em for me after the fire. Gave 'em to Dad to give to me. 'Cause I wasn't sleeping through the night."

There was a long pause. "And they worked?" Sam finally asked, breathlessly.

"Yeah," Dean said. "Yeah, they did. 'Course I never knew that they were the reason the nightmares stopped 'till now, but there you go." He brandished the wheel of ribbon. "So this may just be the manliest thing we'll ever do, but I'm gonna need some help makin' these little guys. Arts and crafts ain't exactly my strong suit. You in?"

"Y-yeah." Sam opened the box of toothpicks and nodded. "Yeah, I'm in."

It took a good two hours, and they were both ugly and slightly creepy—in a faceless Blair Witch stick doll kind of way—but the net result was six little dolls, comprised of bunches of toothpicks to form a body, head, arms and legs with bright embroidery floss wrapped tightly around the body and limbs to hold the bunches together, all reinforced with beads of hot glue because he wasn't exactly an expert tyer of knots with one incapacitated arm. And on top it all off came a wide woven ribbon made of coarse but brightly colored threads to wrap around the body—it looked like a little dress on each doll—each ribbon with an intricate, angular, ritualistic symbol on the front that Dean had drawn with a fine-tipped permanent marker (and thank God he'd broken the left arm instead of the right, and that he could sort of still used the fingers of the other hand). They looked cheap and trashy, and sloppier than he'd have liked, but when Dean recited the words of the spell and the black marker ink of the tiny sigils turned to a silvery color, he knew the spell had taken and would hold. Six ugly little sons of bitches, all tucked neatly (sort of) into a cheap white cotton pouch Dean had bought, and they were good to go.

Except it would've been a lot better if Sam had been able to hold himself together. But he was only on his second doll—and Dean had had to all of the gluing and the sigils for him because his hands were shaking too badly anyway—when Dean looked away for the briefest second, only to turn back to find Sam with a toothpick sticking out of a finger, watching a rivulet of blood course down his hand and wrist with horrified eyes. Dean had had to take a bed sheet and throw it over his hand, and hold it where he couldn't see it the entire time he was pulling out the toothpick and bandaging his finger, and trying to keep at bay the terrible possibility that, unwittingly or not, Sam had just intentionally skewered his own finger. Sam was dazed and compliant the entire time, face suddenly and unnervingly devoid of any thought or emotion, but sounds like little choked gasps kept coming from his throat. By the time he finally snapped out of it, Dean had finished off the last of the dolls.

Sam came to with another vicious and sudden headache that had him bent double over the mess of craft supplies scattered over the bed.

"Sam?"

It was over in a few seconds, but scary as hell nonetheless.

Sam straightened back up, eyes still shut tight against the light, and rubbed his temples. "Yeah," he said tersely. "Right. Uh, h-how many dolls we got left?"

"They're already done, man," Dean said, concerned, holding up the pouch for him to see.

"Oh," he said softly. He rubbed at his eyes, looking both embarrassed and still in pain. "Okay."

He pulled one out of the bag to show Sam. "Check it out," he said, holding it up. "Sorry they kinda look like crap, but the incantation worked just fine. These babies are legit."

Sam took it, and held it in a cupped hand, very gently, as though he was afraid it'd crumble into dust if he so much as looked at it wrong. "This is great," he said, studying the sigil. "Really." He looked up. "Thank you."

And there it was, the tiny, grateful smile that always made Dean feel like he was the most awesome big brother in the history of big brothers. He gave a lopsided grin and shook his head. "Well don't thank me yet, dude. Why don't you give 'em a test drive, huh? See what these little beauties can do."  


***

In the end, though, Dean didn't even know why he'd let himself hope. Sam had been so eager to see the dolls in action, so damn sure that this would help just because Dean had freaking _said_ so, that he'd even cooperated when Dean tried to give him more soup and Gatorade later, despite the fact that he was visibly trembling with the effort of willing himself not to throw it all back up.

  
But they'd used the restraints too, as an extra precaution in case the dolls didn't do any good. And it turned out to be a good thing they did, because Sam spent half the night thrashing and screaming. Dean spent most of the night staring up at the shadowy ceiling from his place on the opposite bed, each of Sam's screams cutting into him with a pain that was near-physical, feeling like a complete failure and thinking that he'd like nothing more than to down a bottle of Jack right about now.

When Dean finally did doze off, around 4 AM when Sam had finally quieted down a bit, he was roused minutes later, ironically, by the smell of something burning. He started and launched himself off the bed only to see that Sam was sitting bolt upright in his own bed, the smell having apparently triggered an immediate reaction from him.

"You smell that?" Dean whispered.

"Uh-huh," Sam breathed, eyes wide with paranoia, roving around the room.

"What d'you think—"

But Sam had twisted suddenly around in his bed, his hands, joined at the wrists by the cuffs, diving under his pillow. He fished around for a second and then retrieved the doll pouch, holding it up. Dean flicked on a lamp, eyes nearly watering at the sudden and artificial brightness of the room, and squinted at the pouch.

It was…off, somehow.

The shape of it looked wrong, deflated.

The drawstrings had browned at the end. Frayed. Dean frowned and stepped closer.

And when Sam opened it up and dumped its contents onto his lap?

Ash.

A pile of ash, black and dirty, poured out onto Sam's knee.

Sam's face, still flushed with fever, drained of all color at the sight. Imploring, he looked up at Dean, as though he couldn't quite process what he was seeing. "Dean?" There was a tremor in his voice.

"It's okay," was Dean's immediate response, although the sight of the ash had left him just as shaken. "It's okay, dude. They were just toothpicks and string and crap anyway. We can make new ones, alright? Better ones. You hear me?"

But Sam wasn't listening. He was holding the bag steady in the sooty fingers of one hand while the other reached into the bag, withdrawing a single, singed doll. Sam stared at it, eyes clouding.

Stomach in painful knots, Dean leaned over to get a better look. The thing's head was burnt to a stub, the tips of its tiny hands blackened. Its ribbon dress was streaked with ash, the sigil faded from silver back into the useless black of Sharpie ink.

"Sam, it's okay," he repeated, but Sam didn't listen to him, fingers tightening around the doll when Dean tried to gently pull it out of his grasp.

Sam continued not to listen for the rest of the morning, virtually catatonic, uttering barely a word to Dean, refusing any food or drink, and drifting back off into a fitful sleep at around noon with the ruined doll still clutched tightly in his hands.

And all Dean could do was watch.

_I don't know how to help him._

To be continued…


	6. Chapter 6

"No," Sam said flatly. He was wedged into one corner of the room, knees drawn up to his chest, looking up at Dean, who looked startled that he'd responded at all.

"What?"

"No," Sam repeated, the firmness of the response somewhat dampened when he let his head fall onto his knees and screwed his eyes shut. But damn his head was pounding _,_ and he was gonna be sick, and it was easier to focus when he couldn't see the spiders, the spiders that were as big as his fist and tearing into the bluish, long-dead flesh of a rotting corpse which may or may not have been Jessica's that was currently lying on his bed behind where Dean was now crouched down in front of him…

Not that it mattered whether he looked at them or not, really, because the longer he ignored them, the angrier they'd become, and it didn't matter that his eyes were closed because they'd just crawl right past Dean and right onto him, tear right into his own flesh with burning pincers. And then he'd be lost again and everything would become pain and noise and fire.

But until that happened, he had to make sure Dean understood. This was important.

"What do you mean, 'no'?" Dean asked. He heard a soft rustling as Dean sat down on the carpet in front of him.

"I m-mean," he started, voice muffled by his knees, "I'll hurt her. She c-can't see me."

"Hurt her?"

"Yeah." He felt the first of the spiders, then, crawling up the leg of his sweatpants—Dean's sweatpants, actually, and a few inches too short for him—its sharp, spindly legs tearing through both cloth and flesh as it went. Sam shuddered at the feeling, knowing that he'd soon have a swarm of them on him, carving him to pieces and then eating him alive like they always did but _no-stop-not-real-not-REAL-concentrate-CONCENTRATE-Dean-Missouri-DeanDeanDean…_

"Sammy?" Dean must've noticed something was up, because even though he still had his eyes closed, the worry in Dean's voice was palpable.

"'M okay…" He cleared his throat, choking back a cry as he felt the spider bite down hard into his hand and two others crawling up his legs. There was no sense in telling himself they weren't there—if he looked, they'd definitely be there. And truth be told, they'd probably seem much more real to him than any other damn thing he could see around him if he did look. Just like everything else he'd been "seeing" over the past few days.

"Well, uh…" Dean continued after a long moment of wordless concern, "Missouri's pretty short, but if it came down to it, dude, sorry but my money'd be on her, not you." He laughed, but the sound was nervous rather than comforting. "I think she could handle herself if…uh…you know, you got confused. And Bobby and me'd be there, anyways. So you got nothing to worry about."

"N-no—" He flinched as he felt fangs sink in somewhere above his elbow. "No, I m-mean…She's a psychic, right?"

"Yeah," Dean said slowly, attempting but not quite pulling off his _well-duh_ voice, "'S kinda the whole point of her visiting, right?"

"Look," Sam said, finally looking up at Dean, and trying not to visibly startle too bad at the sight of the long line of spiders marching inexorably towards him from the bed, or the four or five that were gleefully clinging to his arms, his legs, his stomach and _focusfocusdamnitFOCUS._ "All she n-needs is physical proximity to read minds, right?"

"Right…"

"So s-she comes anywhere near me," Sam said, gesturing at his head with one hand and shaking a spider free and onto the floor with the gesture, "She g-gets all…all _this_ dumped into her own head. Instantly. J-just by being a few f-feet away from me."

Sam didn't miss the flash of _Oh crap, you might be right_ that passed across Dean's face before he recovered his assuredness and said, "Look, she's gotta know that already, right? She wouldn't have offered to come if she didn't have some way of protecting herself from it. I mean, otherwise she'd be a vegetable by now given all the whackjobs she must've come across in her line of work—"

"Whackjob?" Sam repeated quietly. Not that it wasn't true. After all, he was probably ten times more fucked up than your average whackjob anyway…after all, _he_ was the one in a room full of giant spiders, and he was the one not so sure that they weren't real after all and that it wasn't his brother and this shitty motel +room that he was imagining. But that didn't mean the insinuation didn't hurt.

"Shit," Dean muttered, eyes sliding shut as he realized his mistake. "Shit, Sam, I didn't mean—"

_Yeah, you did,_ Sam thought, but he couldn't bring himself to say it. Not when Dean looked so burned out, which he knew was 90% from having to take care of him. Because Sam couldn't make it more than a few minutes without totally losing it. Because suddenly every little, mundane day to day thing was so hard for him to manage. Even stuff as simple as showering, grooming, or going to the bathroom was a huge ordeal, even if he could mostly manage it alone as long as the door was, humiliatingly, wide open and Dean was right nearby the whole time. And Sam couldn't say how much sleep Dean had gotten when he had to listen to Sam screaming and carrying on practically all night long, and as to the food situation—well. Dean had only tried to get takeout for himself twice, but quit after the second time when the sight and smell of the turkey sub he'd ordered himself made Sam throw up and then rendered him unable to eat for the rest of the day. So they were both living off cheap cans of soup and saltines, but the problem was, Dean hated soup. And there wasn't much else that would keep in a motel without a fridge except for that, and it wasn't like they had a car or hardly any cash to spare. But the second that Sam could manage to last more than fifteen minutes without losing himself to the hellfire in his head—if that time ever came at all, which was seeming less and less likely to him—he was going to nag Dean into walking himself to the nearest corner mart and buying himself something he'd actually eat, maybe get himself some cough syrup while he was at it to knock him out at night. Otherwise, Dean was eventually going to land himself right back in the hospital for simple malnourishment without even meaning to.

That, and exhaustion. Because God, he just looked so freaking _tired._ Sam knew from experience that broken bones could take a surprising toll on somebody's energy levels, and that a body that was otherwise fine could sap its own strength in order to heal itself. And that plus a few sleepless nights were clearly doing a number on him. But that wasn't all that was making him tired. It was weariness that ran soul-deep. Sam always caught glimpses of it on his face in the last moments before a memory-vision-hallucination- _thing_ dragged him under, desperation and helplessness in bruised and faded eyes.

So yeah, Sam cut him a break for the whackjob comment, because Dean was clearly at the end of his rope and then some. And it wasn't like it wasn't the truth anyways. "It's okay," he muttered.

Dean shook his head. "No, Sammy, it's not okay, I—"

"Forget it," Sam said shortly, urgency creeping into his voice as he felt the pinpricks of a spider making its way up the back of his neck. His skin crawled, the burning pricks on his skin drawing an involuntary shudder out of him. "F-forget it, it doesn't—" The spider bit down, hard, and he yelped. They were venomous, he knew from experience, and he could already feel his blood churning like boiling mercury and it was freaking _unbearable_ and all his veins were like threads of fire and they were on his face and they were _all over him_ and…

" _Sam_?"

He forced his eyes open. And he was somehow lying flat on his back on the spotty motel carpet, blinking up at the ceiling and at Dean's battered and anxious face hovering above him.

The spiders were gone.

But he'd lost his capacity to process that fact, or anything else that was going on for that matter. "Wha-what?" he muttered. "Dean?" And he could hardly bring himself to care that he probably sounded like a lost, scared little kid.

"Yeah." He bowed his head into Sam's line of vision with a _very_ strained smile that did nothing to disguise his alarm. And Sam himself must've looked really, _really_ freaked, which was likely given the way he felt faint and a bit like the air in the room was too thin, because the worry in Dean's face ratcheted up a notch and he said quickly, "Hey, hey, you're okay. 'M here, alright? You're okay." He reached out a hand like he wanted to help Sam up, but he seemed to change his mind when Sam automatically recoiled and half-withdrew his hand, his features unable to conceal the fact that the rejection hurt. "Can you sit up?" he asked gruffly, clearing his throat.

Dean was weird about this, the physical contact thing, since Sam had shown up in Bootback. Not that he didn't have reason to be, seeing as it'd earned him a busted nose and a few spectacular bruises. Any sane person would be cautious after that, wouldn't come any closer to him than necessary for their own safety, but for Dean it posed an extra problem given his current role as sole caretaker. Not that Dean had ever been one for more physical contact than necessary, even with Sam, and not that it was all that easy with a broken arm anyway. But all the things that came naturally to Dean in any situation where Sam was less than a hundred percent—a palm to the forehead to check his temperature, a steadying hand on his back to keep him from faceplanting, a tight grip on his wrist to keep him conscious, all things that Sam could still remember, if faintly, after a century and a half of nothing but fire and agony—all of that was suddenly…well, not off-limits, but potentially a way to make things ten times worse than they already were. He'd slipped up a few times, inconsistent in his caution—like taking Sam's elbow to steer him into the gas station when Sam was too distracted to notice or resist, holding him up over the toilet that first time he'd tried and failed to eat, or, a few times that he only hazily remembered, pushing or holding him down when he'd gotten particularly violent fighting the restraints—as though helping Sam in that way was second nature, so ingrained into his subconscious that he couldn't entirely get rid of it even when he tried. And that was okay, sometimes, when Sam was all there and not seeing Hell everywhere he turned and when Dean asked permission beforehand, even if such simple and understated shows of made him suspicious despite himself. After all, a person could only be told that they were a worthless abomination so many times before they'd start believing it, and Sam was instinctively not sure he could trust any demonstrations that suggested otherwise, even if they were from Dean. Hell, he could barely even trust that Dean was _Dean_ half the time, even though he wanted to. God, he wanted to…

At any rate, he was aware of things _now_ , more or less, so he figured he might as well try. If only for Dean's sake, so he didn't feel totally useless. Because "totally useless" pretty much summed up the way Sam could see Dean was feeling these days. He reached for Dean's hand and let Dean help pull him upright until he was slumped against the wall, head leaned back against peeling, yellowed wallpaper. He let go of Dean's hand then, his own drifting to the pocket of his sweatpants seemingly of its own accord. His fingers brushed the bristly burned tips of the worry doll's limbs. He figured that Dean had to know that he'd kept the thing, but neither of them had mentioned it—Dean would probably be pissed, see it as some sort of embodiment of his failure that Sam was holding onto, and truth be told, Sam couldn't even explain to himself why he'd kept the damn thing. But holding onto it it felt vitally important somehow in a way he couldn't articulate. Not that it was helping him now that the magic was gone from it, and if anything the dreams and hallucinations had only increased since the other dolls had burned, but it was as if throwing it away was somehow throwing in the towel. After all, it had survived when the others hadn't, and that had to count for something, right? So he'd kept it.

His fingers tightened around the doll. "S-she can't come," he insisted, as if the whole spider incident had never happened.

Dean played along, but his crouched stance didn't relax, and he'd unconsciously leaned forward a bit as if he could protect Sam from whatever had just attacked his mind through sheer physical proximity. "Well Sam, sorry to tell ya this, I think she's gonna come if she damn well pleases. Don't think she's gonna warm up to the idea of either of us bossing her around."

Sam let his eyes fall shut and shook his head, suddenly exhausted himself. "Won't see her," he muttered. And besides, what could she do for him that Dean couldn't do, anyway? If the fried worry doll in his pocket was any indication, not much.

"Sam…" Dean growled, but cut off with an aggravated sigh. "Listen, man," he said in a lower voice. "You need help." The admission sounded pained, as though this was something he didn't even want to admit to himself let alone Sam.

Funny how _you need help_ could sound like _you're nuts._

"I've g-got help," Sam said quietly. "You're helping me."

Dean did look a little touched at the insinuation that he was anything other than useless in the midst of this mess, and gave a bit of a sad grin, but shook his head. "Well yeah, but let's face it, I kinda suck at it. And you deserve the help of somebody who _doesn't_ suck at it."

"Like a shrink?" Sam asked, raising an eyebrow.

"No," Dean said, a little impatiently. "Like Missouri."

"I'm _not_ seeing—"

Dean rolled his eyes. "Alright, whatever. Have it your way." He paused, though, and his expression became uncertain. "In the meantime, though…" he began, as though not sure exactly how to broach the topic, "She did suggest something else we could try."

"What?" Sam asked, unable to muster much interest or enthusiasm.

"Meds."

"Meds?" he couldn't help the derisive edge to his voice. "Seriously?"

"Yeah."

"What kind?" he asked warily.

"Uh…" Dean absently rubbed at the back of his neck. "She said we might wanna try you on an antipsychotic."

_Right, because I'm psychotic now…_ It wasn't fair of him to think that, not when Dean really was just trying to do what was best for him, but the realization of _I'm insane and everybody knows it_ was hardly a pleasant one. Even if he'd known it in the back of his mind ever since he'd told that nurse at the hospital he was schizophrenic and she'd accepted it without question.

Dean looked at him for a long time, as if waiting for an answer. Sam didn't meet his eyes, but after awhile he said, "It's k-kinda funny, though."

"What's funny?" Dean asked, expression indicating that he found this entire situation to be pretty damn far from _funny_.

"That s-somebody like Missouri is r-recommending I take meds. S-sounds pretty—"

"What, pragmatic?"

"Yeah, for her."

Dean shrugged. "Well I thought so too, and I told her, but I mean you gotta figure that people's minds are her job. And she said something about how a person's brain's as much a physical thing as it is a metaphysical entity of psychic energy or whatever… And that the two parts spill over into each other all the time, and that if something's gone south with one part, something's probably gonna go south with the other."

"S-so you're saying…" Sam said slowly, "I really could have psychosis o-or schizophrenia or something."

And damn if Dean didn't look just about heartbroken at that. "Yeah," he conceded, voice strained. "Maybe." He leaned forward a little. "But listen," he said. "If you do, then that's not exactly bad news, because it means we can do something about it, right? I mean, hundreds of regular people get diagnosed with this crap every day. And in a lot of cases, they take their meds and they live totally normal lives and they're _fine_. And if they can deal with it, so can you, Sam."

Dean sounded so confident, expression so earnest even if it was all just a brave-face, that Sam almost found himself believing him. But what went unspoken between them was that "hundreds of regular people" don't become the devil's plaything for a century and a half. Nonetheless Sam allowed the words to comfort him. "Okay," he whispered. "We can try."

Dean actually smiled. "Good."

"Where are w-we gonna get meds?" Sam asked.

"Well I talked to Bobby—" Dean began.

"Wait, you already talked about this w-with Bobby?" He felt a little stab of hurt at that, that he hadn't been included in the decision-making process here. He wasn't so far gone that he couldn't provide the least amount of valuable input regarding what was going on in his own head.

Was he?

"You were asleep, man," Dean said. "It was pretty early this morning. I called Missouri, then Bobby called me, and I brought it up, is all. I told him I was gonna ask you first, but if you want 'em, apparently it really pays if you're a hunter to have a kid working in pharmaceuticals. It was a, uh, family duty of this James Milburn kid's to keep his mom and her buddies stocked with all the good stuff, and Bobby thinks he'll hook us up if we ask him."

Sam hesitated, then nodded, feeling a rush of gratitude towards Dean for not making him totally feel like he was too infirm to have a say in any of this. Though, he suspected, if he'd said no, Dean probably would've given Bobby the okay to get the pills anyway if he thought that was what would be best for him.

And really, it couldn't hurt to at least try the med route, right?

Dean gave him an encouraging grin. "Awesome." He started to stand up. "Hey, you hungry?" he asked casually.

But Sam knew the question was anything but casual. He had had a…well, a _bad_ day, to put it simply, and this was the first actual conversation he'd managed to have with Dean all day. And the sun had nearly set, and he hadn't eaten yet, either. He wasn't really hungry, or at least didn't think he could keep all that much down right now, but to appease Dean he nodded anyway.

"Here." Dean held out his hand again to help Sam up.

And Sam took it, but almost let go as, barely a second later, a figure appeared, right by Dean's shoulder. Sam's insides went cold. The girl's hair obscured her face, and her stomach… Blood was spilling from her stomach down a white cotton shift. It was the same girl from earlier—and the spiders…the spiders were back, stripping her flesh down to the bone even as she stood there, taking great deep rattling breaths, her very presence condemning him. And it _was_ Jess, it had to be, bleeding like that… No, wait, not Jess, her hair was the wrong color… No, it was Robin, the bartender Robin, who he'd murdered, _murdered_ , shot in the stomach in cold blood….

She shook her hair out of her face, and shakily raised a shriveled finger to point at him. Spiders practically dripped off the rotting flesh of her arm.

And seriously, how could Dean not know she was there?

_Notrealnotreal…_ but she _was_ real, she was _right freaking there._ And she shook her hair out of her eyes, and Sam started when he saw that she in fact _had_ no eyes, and was staring at him with gaping, bleeding, empty sockets. She opened her mouth as though to speak to him, but a rattling gurgle was all that she could manage, and more blood, somehow a thick, sickly black color, dribbled out and rolled down her chin.

He vaguely registered Dean talking to him, wringing his wrist— _notrealnotrealnotreal—_ but he could barely hear or understand him.

"No," Sam found himself muttering. "No, n-no, stay away from me…please…" and he tried to edge sideways along the wall, tried to wrench himself out of Dean's grasp.

The Robin- _thing_ put a hand on Dean's shoulder. Dean didn't even flinch at her touch, didn't seem to react at all, still focused on Sam. But then…but then Dean's eyes were gone too, and they were oozing black blood down his cheeks and it was staining his teeth and dribbling out of his own lips, while he was suddenly, impossibly grinning like crazy….and Sam tried to pull his wrist away, but suddenly Dean's nails were biting hard into his wrist and his touch was _burning_ like nothing Sam had ever felt before and _Why-is-he-still-hurting-me-I-thought-he-wouldn't-hurt-me-again-I-thought-I-was-out_ and _Dean-Dean-DEAN-please-please-stop-please-help…._

_And there's only two beings in existence who can burn like that and neither of them is Dean._

_Oh God, I thought I was out._

With a sharp cry he finally managed to tear himself away from _Dean-NOT-Dean-Michael-Lucifer-NOT-Dean_ , and he scrambled away from him and Robin backwards towards the beds and towards the door. And he was ripping the door open, and stumbling out into a half-full parking lot where the brilliant colors of the setting sun streaking the sky nearly blinded him, searing his sore eyes. And then he was on his hands and knees for whatever reason—maybe he'd stumbled—and dragging himself across the warm, crumbling asphalt and _then_ …

Then Hell fell away again. Then he realized. Where he was, what he was doing.

He was facedown in a crappy parking lot, in God-Knows-Where, Kansas, sobbing his eyes out and trying to run—no, _crawl_ away on now-bleeding palms from monsters that weren't there and weren't after him and weren't even _real_.

And someone was yelling his name.

He sniffed once— _God, I'm pathetic_ , and more to the point, _God, I AM insane_ —and tried to push himself upright on wobbling arms. He couldn't quite manage it, but did manage to prop himself up on his elbows. He swiped the back of one hand across now-wet and stinging eyes.

"Sam? _Sammy!_ "

Heavy footsteps. Somebody was running toward him. And three guesses who.

Sam turned his head to look, and sure enough, Dean was barreling toward him, and in an instant was on his knees beside him. "Sam," he gasped out, and panic couldn't be more palpable etched on his face or lacing his voice. He reached toward him, which meant, Sam objectively knew, that he was trying to check him for injury, but before he could stop himself, Sam had rolled over onto his back and held up his arms in a defensive gesture. "No," he was saying, sobbing, practically choking on the word. "N-no, _no_ …" And even though he knew it was Dean now, _knew_ it, he couldn't stop.

_Pathetic_ , a voice whispered in his ear, a voice that sounded terrifyingly like the _other one,_ the _first_ of the _other_ ones, the one without a soul.

Dean withdrew his hand. "Whoa, okay, okay, calm down," he said quickly. "Won't hurt you." He glanced around them. "Goddamn it, Sam," he muttered under his breath, though the words sounded more tired and sad than angry. "You're gonna get yourself run over."

"'M sorry," Sam breathed, breath hitching. "S-sorry…" He felt lightheaded, sort of nauseous, shaky all over. Effects of hysteria, probably. From his pocket, he could feel the sharp limbs of the broken worry doll jabbing into his thigh.

"No, it's…" Dean ran a hand through his own hair, agitated, obviously not sure what else to do if he couldn't physically confirmed that Sam was unharmed. "It's fine, just…are you alright?"

At that, Sam let out a short, incredulous and slightly manic-sounding laugh.

"Right…yeah, dumb question," Dean said, frowning. "But you're not hurt or anyth—"

Dean was cut off by the sudden blaring honk of a car horn and the imposing glare of headlights through the hazy twilit air. Sam started at the noise and yelped, automatically turning his face away from the light. With a growl, Dean vaulted himself off the ground. Sam glanced up at him. He was fixing what Sam presumed was a car trying to pull out of the parking lot with a murderous glare, gesturing at the driver to move around them. The car honked again, long and rude, but pulled around them with a screech of tires. "Yeah, up yours, asshole," Dean yelled after the guy before crouching down again. "That guy better be checking out, or next time I swear I'm gonna pepper the tailgate of his precious little pansy-ass Mitsubishi." He shook his head, disgusted. " _People_ , man. I dunno." His features morphed back into that ever-present mask of concern when he looked down at Sam. "So…yeah," he said softly. "How 'bout we get you back inside and call Bobby about those pills, huh?"

Sam closed his eyes and nodded.


	7. Chapter 7

Quetiapine. 800 mg a day. Commonly used to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, sleep and anxiety disorders…hell, even Tourette syndrome. So they figured they had all their bases covered.

James Milburn had Skyped with them before Bobby even returned from Kansas City with the pills, explained everything in meticulous detail—the dosage, the side effects, everything. Dean hadn't even heard of Skype before that day, even with a year of "normal" under his belt, and hadn't understood why the guy insisted on using a webcam instead of a phone, or why just explaining things to Dean or Bobby instead wouldn't suffice. Bobby already had all the information written down and had given it to Dean over the phone; Dean had it memorized. Especially while he was watching Sam struggle to pay attention during the call, keep his focus reigned in and eyes trained on the computer screen and the kind, patient young face—late twenties, probably close Sam's own age— speaking to him on the other end. But as Sam nodded jerkily a few times at the screen and scrawled the important bits into a battered old notebook, Dean realized why this had been a good idea, and was immediately filled with a rush of gratitude toward the Milburn kid. It was all for the purpose of making Sam feel like he had some measure of control over the situation, like he really had some degree of choice in the matter. Which he did—Dean wasn't about to shove meds down his throat if he honestly didn't want them—but they'd all reached the conclusion after the little parking lot incident that their options were pretty slim here. This kid was no doctor, but even so, he must've known enough about psychotic drugs in his line of work to realize that the people receiving them felt like they had little control over anything in their lives. So Sam with his forehead scrunched in concentration listening to James rattling off the pros and cons of the medication as though an informed decision was truly his to make? A blessing, however small.

The side effects, though, were something that, unfortunately, Dean had already banked on being nasty. He'd done his own research, and was chagrined to find that side effects of antipsychotics could be so bad that a whole other set of meds were often used to combat them. Quetiapine didn't look as terrible as some of the others, though, so they were lucky in that regard. Still, it was apparently a powerful sedative—"You're gonna feel like a zombie for the first week or so, and it's probably best if you don't drive or try to shoot a gun at all when you're on this stuff 'cause of the dosage," James had said, his tone a mite sympathetic, because hunting of any sort was obviously out—but hey, if a sedative kept Sam calm and helped him get some sleep, Dean would take what he could get. And then there were other, slightly more embarrassing side effects that it had in common with all psychotic drugs, ones that Dean could care less about. Weight gain—which could actually do him some good, seeing as his inability to eat anything substantial without being sick was starting to show through slightly sunken cheeks and loosely fitting clothing—and…well…impotence. Under any circumstances but these Dean would be tempted to tease him mercilessly for that, but as things stood, he couldn't think of much occasion in Sam's foreseeable future where reduced sex drive might become an issue at all, because the day when Dean would be able to take Sam out to a roadside bar and try to set him up with some smart, pretty, shy young thing sitting by herself at the counter seemed pretty hilariously out of reach. And that thought was so damn depressing that Dean wouldn't dare bring it up.

After the Skype call had ended—a few hours before Bobby was scheduled to return—Sam pushed scooted his chair back from the room's tiny table, let out a shaky breath, and carefully closed the notebook. His eyes were drifting in and out of focus, and Dean knew how much the effort of trying to pay attention to the computer screen for the past ten minutes had cost him. He'd be lucky if Sam wasn't completely out of it, or worse, thrashing and screaming, for the rest of the day.

"So," Dean said, moving to sit in the opposite chair and pushing the open laptop between them closed. "What do you think?"

"Huh?" His eyes flicked to Dean's, the sound of the laptop clicking shut having made him start a little.

"The meds," Dean said, conversationally as he could. "Still wanna go through with it?"

Sam shrugged. "Yeah…I guess. I m-mean…the s-side effects can't b-be any worse than…" he gestured vaguely, helplessly at himself.

"No, they won't," Dean agreed, mask of nonchalance slipping a little. His heart sank at the dull hopelessness in Sam's eyes before his gaze flitted away.

And Dean realized then that Sam honestly didn't think that this was going to help in the least. That he'd been paying attention to James out of mere courtesy and out of a desire to know what kind of side effects he'd be dealing with, not because he actually thought that the pills were going to work. That his hopes of finding any kind of cure, anything to make this better, had withered away right along with Missouri's worry dolls. That he'd do it, but more to humor Dean and Bobby than anything else.

"Look, man," Dean said, leaning forward a bit. "We got nothing to lose here, right? Nothing to lose, everything to gain. We're no worse off if it doesn't work."

"I know." Sam still wouldn't meet his eyes. Except they _were_ worse off, they were a hell of a lot worse off, because Sam was getting _worse,_ bit by bit, every day. And they both knew it. Acutely.

"Besides," Dean said, slapping a palm on the tabletop, "Anything that helps you get in your forty winks and makes you hungry for something other than a can of chicken and stars sounds pretty awesome to me. Am I right?"

"Mhmm," Sam said, his eyes having moved to stare intently at the dust-coated vent on the ceiling over his head. His hands tightened around the arms of his chair.

And Dean knew it'd be no use, that Sam would be gone in a matter of seconds, but he kept his mouth running anyway, chest clenching painfully as Sam's eyes grew wide and fearful at some new, invisible torment above their heads. "And we gotta get you eatin' your Wheaties again, otherwise you're gonna start looking less Andre the Giant and more scarecrow. A very, uh, sleep-deprived scarecrow." He paused. "Sam?"

"Hm?" Sam was inching the chair slowly backwards, as if any sudden movements would make the thing tear itself away from the ceiling and jump on his head. One hand was inching toward his pocket, toward where a switchblade would normally be concealed if Dean hadn't had to take and hide all of the weapons Sam usually kept on his person after the very first night, after the mishap with Bobby and the sawed-off.

After that, things panned out more or less as Dean had expected them to, given the sorts of days that Sam had been having of late—a few more seconds of complete unresponsiveness, Sam let out a sudden yelp, throwing up his arms to shield himself, as though whatever it was he thought he saw on the ceiling had leapt down to attack him. In doing so, he overbalanced his chair would've fallen backwards if Dean hadn't reached out and grabbed his arm to pull him back forward. And, also as expected, grabbing him just made everything about ten times worse than it already was. He completely flipped out, and Dean barely avoided the fist that nearly connected with his right eye, and could only watch as Sam bolted away from the table and wound up crouched down next to the small dresser that stood between the two beds, fingers madly scrabbling and tearing at the ratty carpet as though he were determined to shred it with his bare hands. It was as though Sam was trying to dig his way out of the room through the floorboards, Dean thought for a crazy moment.

Dean stood, carefully, and moved over to the beds. He didn't move into the gap between them, mostly because any sort of close proximity to Sam at this point wasn't likely to do anything more than freak Sam out even more .There wasn't any getting through to him now, not when he was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, putting forth his best effort at ripping the carpet to bits, his breath coming in harsh, choked gasps interspersed with what sounded like desperate whimpers.

Dean stood there, shuffling his feet—freaking _hating_ that he didn't have a clue how to handle this anymore—for about a minute or so until he couldn't take it anymore, and took a cautious step forward. "Sammy?" he asked, tentatively.

Sam's head snapped up. His pupils were dilated.

And then he started screaming.

…

When Bobby finally came back, it was to the sight of Sam sprawled out on the floor between the beds, still and unnervingly silent, hands cuffed. Dean was sitting on the bed nearest the door, pretending to watch some late-night sitcom rerun on the battered TV with wide, glazed eyes. He felt completely drained, in every possible sense, his casted arm aching fiercely where it rested on his stomach. Sam had shoved and hit it when he'd been struggling against Dean's attempts to wrestle him flat to the ground and get the cuffs around his wrists. It sickened Dean a little that that had been necessary at all. But what was even more sickening was that, after he had spent a few moments of fighting to achieve what would've been the near-Herculean task of getting the cuffs onto a wildly struggling Sam with only one functional arm and hand, without warning Sam had gone limp beneath him. At first Dean thought he'd passed out when all the tension left his limbs and they went crashing to the floor like a dropped marionette, but then he'd noticed that Sam's eyes were open. Open, still looking at him, but as terrifyingly vacant as they had been when he'd attempted to gag himself on the muffin in the gas station.

As if all the fight had gone out of him.

Dean gulped, hands shaking a little as he took Sam's now-pliant arms and snapped the cuffs around his wrists, not even bothering securing his ankles.

Because, to be honest?

He'd almost preferred it when Sam had been fighting back.

And right about now, watching Sam lie there like a rock in the soft glow of the TV screen, Dean really wished that they'd had the cash to spare on some booze.

By the time the knock on the door came, followed by the sound of keys jangling and turning in a lock, Dean had been nearly asleep, vision blurring, unable to fight the pull of bone-deep fatigue any longer. He pushed himself off the bed with a groan, glancing down at Sam, who was still sprawled boneless on the floor, face turned away from him. He didn't stir when the door creaked open to admit Bobby.

All in all, Bobby looked pretty rough, bruises mottling his temple and the side of his face where Sam had hit him, exhaustion evident in the droop of his shoulders, the dark bags under his eyes, and the very large cup of coffee in one hand. But when those tired eyes took in Dean standing at the foot of the bed, his hair sticking up in odd places where he'd been lying on it and a weary smile on his own face, sheer relief washed over Bobby's features.

Relief that made it apparent exactly how apprehensive Bobby had been to leave Dean alone to deal with Sam in the first place. But they'd needed to find a tow—there was no way around that—and Sam and Bobby had needed the time apart to spare all three of them the extreme awkwardness resulting from Sam having tried to kill Bobby for a second time in a few months, unwittingly or no. What had worried Bobby, though he hadn't exactly said it in so many words, was that Dean wouldn't be able to handle Sam on his own, and that Sam might hurt him, or himself, despite Dean's insistences to the contrary. And neither Dean nor Sam had been crazy about Bobby driving when he might still be seeing double from getting bashed in the head, but it wasn't like they'd had another option when Dean was the only one who was able to talk Sam down— _some_ of the time, that is— when Sam was at his worst.

"Hey," Dean said, smile widening, nearly dizzy with relief himself. "Damn, it's good to see you, Bobby."

Bobby set his coffee down on the table. "Likewise," he said, gruffly. "Always thought Kansas City was kind of a craphole." But when he looked at Sam, the crotchety-old-guy demeanor fell away, replaced with a concerned frown. "How's he holdin' up?" he asked, voice quieter. Dean followed his gaze. Sam's breathing had grown rapid, shoulders heaving, head tucked into his crooked elbows. His hands, joined by the cuffs, had clenched into fists.

Dean looked away from Sam, jaw clenched tight, and shrugged.

"That good, huh?" Bobby sighed.

"Yeah, pretty much." He noticed the somewhat crumpled white paper bag Bobby held in the hand that hadn't held the coffee. He pointed at it. "Those the pills?"

"Yup." Bobby reached into the bag, tossed Dean a medium-sized, white, unmarked pill bottle. "And I got another three prescriptions' worth out in the truck."

The "truck" was an beat-up old Ford pickup with a tow hitch on the back connected to an old empty flatbed. Bobby had found some kid, twenty-something, bored, with clearly no real automotive knowledge to speak of, stuck manning his parents' used car dealership in the city while they were away on an anniversary cruise in the Bahamas. The truck had been rotting in the yard with no potential buyers for as long as the kid could remember, though his parents were, in theory, at some point intending to buy some replacement parts for it. The boy told him, cynically, that "if you can make the damn thing run, you can keep it for a hundred bucks." And, after raising the necessary funds in cash by hustling some pool, taking the necessary parts from the rental and "liberating" a few from some of the nicer models at the dealership, the truck was Bobby's. And boy, were the kid's parents gonna be pissed when they got back. Another few phone calls later and Bobby had, with James Milburn's help, dredged up one of his mom's old contacts, who would be coming to Bootback tomorrow to help them move the Impala onto the flatbed.

And then there were the pills.

So yeah. All in all, Bobby pretty much rocked right now.

Dean held up the bottle, shook it. "This is awesome." He laughed a little. "Seriously, man, I owe you like, a billion fixer uppers when we get back to your place."

"You bet your ass you do," Bobby agreed. But what went unspoken was that, if these pills didn't do their job, there wasn't much chance that Dean was going to be able to ditch Sam to go work on cars.

A beat of silence passed. From his spot on the carpet, Sam shifted, his breath hitching.

Bobby gestured at Sam. "You wanna talk to him, see if he snaps out of it?"

Dean cleared his throat. "Uh, yeah. Yeah." He didn't know whether it would do any good at this point, but he didn't say as much. He went over to the space between the bed, thought briefly about crouching down next to Sam but decided against it, and opted instead to sit on one of the beds. He perched on the bed's edge, the springs sagging and creaking beneath him as he bent forward. "Sam?" he said, and waited a second, continuing when, as expected, he got no response. "Hey, dude, up and at 'em. Bobby's here, and he loaded up on the good stuff for ya and everything." Huh. _The good stuff._ Their blanket term for all knockout painkillers. As if this was just another hunt. He smiled ruefully at his word choice. "You don't wanna bum here all day and hurt his feelings, now do ya?"

"'Snighttime," came the muffled response.

Dean started a little, not having expected an answer. "What?"

Sam rolled over, slowly, to face him. "I _said,_ " he croaked, "It's nighttime. Not daytime." His face looked ravaged, sallower than it had been a week ago and unshaven. His eyes, though bloodshot, brightened a bit when they found Dean.

Some of Dean's nervousness drained away at that— _thank God he recognizes me—_ and his face split into what must've been his first genuine smile in days. "Yeah, alright, smartass," he drawled. "All _night,_ then."

"And no, I won't," Sam said, trying and failing to push himself upright before he seemed to realize that he was cuffed. He flushed a little as Dean tacitly offered his good arm to help him up, but took it nonetheless, and sat on the edge of the second bed while Dean fished in his pockets for the keys.

Bobby cleared his throat. Sam jumped, obviously having not noticed or else forgotten that Bobby was there, and his eyes scanned the room for a panicked moment before landing on Bobby. His shoulders sagged a bit, his relief palpable at what Dean guessed was the fact that it really was Bobby he was seeing and not another monster from inside his mind. He smiled, hesitant but genuine. "Hey, Bobby." His eyes flicked to the cut and bruises that decorated the side of Bobby's face, and the smile faded.

But Bobby smiled back, and warmly. "Good to see you up, son."

Realizing the words were meant as absolution, Sam nodded, ducked his head, and muttered a flustered, "Thanks."

Dean nearly rolled his eyes at that, torn somewhere between amused and exasperated and thankful—damn kid and his damn bleeding heart. Some things, apparently, wouldn't change, despite everything.

And he could tell things were Sam and Bobby were good now, or as good as they were going to get, and that was a weight off all their shoulders.

Dean cleared his throat. "So…" he said to the room at large, going to work on the first of Sam's cuffs. "Who's hungry?"

…

Sam took the first dose of Quetiapine later that night before he went to bed.

"Bottoms' up, Sammy," Dean had said with as much bravado as he could muster, handing Sam the pills and a Gatorade bottle.

"Thanks," he muttered, but he frowned down at the pills, mustard-yellow and oh-so-tiny in his palm. And Dean knew what he was thinking—a few little pills against a two lifetimes of Hell. Didn't seem like a very fair fight. But Sam offered no further comment, and took the pills.

When he was done, he gestured at the cuffs lying on the bedside table. When he pointed, Dean noted the ring of bruises that encircled his wrist from those very cuffs—because padded or not, he spent about half of his time locked up in them trying to escape them—and frowned.

"Uh, we should—" Sam began.

"Yeah," Dean said, grabbing for cuffs.

"Just in case," Sam added quietly.

"Yeah," Dean repeated, mouth suddenly dry, knowing that to Sam, _just in case_ was the equivalent of _because the pills aren't going to do a damn thing._

"Are you gonna stay up?" Sam asked him. Bobby had already turned in, and was sleeping on the other bed. And ever since the worry doll incident, Dean had had to stay up and watch while Sam slept, to make sure he didn't hurt himself or roll off the bed, and to attempt to talk him down, keep him from carrying on too loudly. (They hadn't gotten kicked out of the room because of noise _yet_ , but Dean thought that that had more to do with the fact that nobody had stayed in the rooms in either side of them, this being a pretty rundown motel in a pretty crappy town.)

"Yeah, why not." He shrugged. "There's gonna be a _M*A*S*H_ marathon on channel twelve tonight. Was gonna stay up anyway." Which they both knew was a lie, but Sam looked grateful nonetheless.

He settled down in the bedside chair once, between the two of them, they managed to secure Sam's arms and legs. Dean tugged the blanket up over him—which embarrassed Sam a bit, even if he was getting used to it by now—gave an easy smile, and said, "Now try to catch some shut-eye, dude. 'Cause when those pills kick in, we're gonna need your help lifting the car tomorrow. And you'd better damn be rested up, 'cause if you drop my baby, I'll kill you, I swear."

Sam grinned a bit, not bothering to say what they both knew—that if the pills _did_ work, Sam was going to be, as James had told them, too "zombie-like" to do much of anything but sit there and watch, right along with Dean, who knew he was going to have to be practically chained to something to keep from hovering while Bobby and Marie's friend loaded his demolished car up.

Within minutes, Sam was asleep.

…

Dean woke to somebody shaking him by the shoulder. He must've fallen asleep himself—he was slumped over the side of Sam's bed, his casted arm squished beneath him at an awkward angle and hurting like a bitch, his nose aching viciously where it'd been pressed against the sheets. He winced, rubbing at his arm above the cast, and looked up into the amused face of Bobby. He opened his mouth to gripe about being rudely awakened, but Bobby silently shushed him, nodding his head towards the bed, past Dean. Dean turned and looked.

There was Sam, lying on his back, stone-still and fast asleep. His breaths were deep, even, silent, his face calm and neutral.

And suddenly Dean was grinning like a moron.

And so was Bobby, a little.

Dean and Bobby went about their morning activities in silence, in the interest of letting Sam sleep as long as possible. Memories of the night before, and why he'd fallen asleep, finally trickled back as he ate, showered, and dressed: Sam was just as bad as usual at first, thrashing, moaning and crying out in his sleep, but then the nightmares had, after an hour or so, miraculously tapered off. And Sam _slept._ Really slept. And Dean obviously had, too.

It wasn't until Dean had gotten out of the shower and was sitting with Bobby at the table over coffee while Bobby consulted a road map he'd picked up to double check the route back to Sioux Falls that Sam stirred, groaned a little, and finally sat up.

Dean's nose was starting to throb in protest all the grinning he'd done that morning, but he couldn't resist. "Hey there, Sleeping Beauty," he called. "How're ya doin?"

"Mm," Sam muttered, brow furrowed, blinking around the room until his gaze settled blearily on them. "Hungry," he said, looking confused, as if this was an entirely alien notion to him.

And Dean thought his heart might just burst out of his chest. "Bobby got doughnuts," he said, pointing at the open box. "Have at."

"Awesome," Sam muttered. He held up his joined wrists. "Gimme a hand with these?"

…

Dean and Sam ended up staying behind altogether when Bobby left for Bootback to retrieve the car. It irritated the hell out of Dean that he couldn't at least watch, even if having a cast meant he actually _do_ anything to help. But he hadn't pushed it, mostly because Sam had looked freaked at the prospect of getting into the truck, even for a short drive.

But speaking of Sam…

Dean could hardly bring himself to believe it. Sam was doing friggin' _fantastic_ since he'd woken up. Sure, the pills had left him exhausted, especially when he'd had to take another dosage that morning and had fallen asleep again not long after, but when awake, he knew what was going on, where he was, and _who_ Dean was. Hell, they'd even been able to watch TV for a good few hours, have a good laugh at an episode of _Jersey Shore_ that had come on one of the only available channels in this place, and had had a serious debate about whether or not Snooki was, in fact, just a really hot Oompa Loompa. They'd played War with a battered deck of cards Dean had found days ago in a dresser drawer, and unlike the last week, Sam had actually been able to focus on the game for more than just a few short minutes. He was drowsy, and honestly looked a little stoned, but he seemed otherwise happy, and his eyes only wandered once or twice every hour or so.

While he cut the deck for another game, the late afternoon sunlight filtering through the window and onto the table and grubby cards, Dean finally asked Sam how well _he_ thought the pills were working.

Sam had smiled tiredly. "They're… good," he said. "Really good. I mean, I'm still, uh, seeing some stuff, but…" His eyes cut away from Dean's to something over by the opposite wall, and back again. "I know it's not real. I dunno how, but I do." He wasn't stuttering anymore, Dean noted.  
"That's awesome," Dean said, and he sincerely hoped that someday James Milburn won the freaking lottery, married a French supermodel, and never had to work a day in his life again.

"Yeah," Sam said. He chuckled. "But to be honest, even if the stuff _is_ real, I'm too fucking tired to care right now."

"Yeah, well," Dean said, "it's not." He pushed Sam's card stack across the table to him.

Sam's eyes skittered away towards the wall again. "I know."

Dean turned his first card over. "Ace," he said triumphantly.

"You suck."

…

When Bobby came back that night, with one pitifully smashed-up Impala in tow, he came bearing a pizza-box. Dean had called earlier and told him to go ahead and get it when Bobby had asked about dinner plans, cautiously optimistic that Sam would be able to handle the smell and the taste of it. Sam had said it'd be fine, and after all he'd actually managed to eat some today without once getting sick—the pills making him hungry as promised— but Dean watched him out of the corner of his eye when Bobby came through the door to make sure that the smell of grease and melted cheese wouldn't have Sam running for the bathroom.

It didn't.

Sam ate less than Dean would've liked, giving his pizza slice a weird look every now and then while he ate. But he wasn't sick afterwards, and he, Dean, and Bobby actually managed to have what felt like the first _normal_ conversation in days.

"So I figure we can take our time gettin' back to my place," Bobby said, between mouthfuls of pepperoni. "Ain't no rush, and I don't know if that old rustbucket out there can handle goin' much above fifty miles an hour anyway."

Which meant, Dean knew, that Bobby was willing to take it slow for Sam's sake. But he did have a point—the truck _was_ a piece of crap. Not to mention it smelled. _Bad._ Kinda like warmed-over cat piss. And with a busted air conditioner, and all of them packed in three across in the front seat, it was bound to be one long, interesting ride.

"Okay," Sam said, carefully ripping off a piece of crust and putting it in his mouth.

"Anything worth stopping to see along the way?" Dean smirked. "Maybe the world's _second_ biggest ball of twine?"

"Well if you're gonna be a smartass about it, _you_ can drive the whole way," Bobby said dryly, but he looked amused.

Dean gestured at his cast with the tip of his rolled-up pizza slice. "That's real nice, Bobby. Make the invalid drive."

Bobby snorted. "A broken arm don't make ya an invalid, kid. Take it from a reformed invalid."

"Oh, yeah, 'cause you were an invalid, but you got better," Dean said, cramming the pizza slice into his mouth.

"Don't be a jerk, Dean," Sam said, but his lips twitched. Bobby rolled his eyes.

A few minutes later, Sam scratched absently at his cheek, and under his chin, looking a little irritated. A good two weeks' worth of beard growth resided there. "God," he muttered.

"Got a little peach fuzz goin' there, Sammy," Dean said wryly.

"Shut up," Sam snapped, a bit of a flush creeping into his face.

"No, really, I think it suits you," Dean said, enjoying how incredibly irked Sam looked. "Chicks dig the whole cro-mag, lumberjack thing."

"It's itchy," Sam muttered. "Dunno how you do it," he said to Bobby.

"Easy," Bobby said. "I don't _do_ anything."

They laughed.

"Seriously, though, how bad is it?" Sam asked. He ran a hand over his chin in distaste.

"You mean on a scale of pedo to Joaquin Phoenix?" Dean asked with a wicked grin.

"Shut up," Sam mumbled, definitely red in the face now.

"Just saying."

Before Sam went to bed that night, he emerged from the bathroom showered and clean-shaven.

And Dean couldn't have been prouder. He knew from experience how…awkward…it had been, when he'd first come back from Hell himself, to have to scrape a freaking _blade_ across his face once a day, no matter how commonplace and mundane an activity shaving really was. There were some days when his hands were shaking so bad he'd cut himself, and others when he'd been unable to go through with it at all. Which was pretty damned embarrassing, but still, he got it, and he got why Sam had neglected to do it altogether since getting his memories back.

"Looking good," Dean chuckled when Sam walked past him and practically collapsed into bed.

"Bite me." But there was no heat behind the words.

…

The trip back to Sioux Falls, all things considered, was shaping up to take them nearly a week.

Of course, the time spent actually _driving_ was rather limited.

For all that the pills seemed to be fairly effective, the drive still proved to be a bit of an endurance test for Sam. The pills did continue to make him ridiculously exhausted, so he was able to sleep through some of the trip, his head slumping against the passenger door. And once, unconsciously, onto Dean's shoulder as well, which had made Dean roll his eyes, but he didn't push Sam off, and Bobby mercifully didn't comment except for a quirked eyebrow. But while Sam was awake, things were tough for him. He would go quiet for long stretches of time, his eyes roving around the truck's interior or sometimes intensely focused on the road to the exclusion of all else. He'd rock back and forth in the seat most of the time, his breathing near the point of hyperventilation. Just because he knew that the things he were seeing weren't real probably didn't make it any easier when they were accosting him in such a small space, Dean thought grimly. So every two or three hours, they had to pull over, find gas stations to stop at. Or, more often, they'd find rest areas, where Sam would sit on a bench or picnic table, shut his eyes, and will himself to calm down. Dean would sit with him in silence until it passed, which usually didn't take long. Then he'd get up and pace while Dean raided the vending machines for food and fluids to replace whatever Sam wouldn't admit to having puked up when he came out of the dingy restrooms.

It was much better, though, when they stopped for the night. Or rather, the late afternoon. Sam was happy again, calmer, and by the second night on the road, they'd even removed the handcuffs while Sam slept. Sam insisted on keeping the shackles on his feet, as a precautionary measure, but he seemed relieved to give his bruise-blackened wrists a break.

They avoided diners and public places, even main highways when they could. Sam was still pretty skittish around people, even when he could now distinguish that they were, in fact, people.

But he was eating more, sleeping more, and talking more, the lengths of time where he'd get trapped in his memories or nightmares significantly less. And Dean was thrilled about it.

On the third day, as a surprise, Dean had raided a used bookstore while it was his turn to go out for food. He was a bit out of his element in that regard, but he still knew what his brother liked, and raided the classical literature section, ending up with a huge paper bag full of Dickens, Hugo, Steinbeck, Milton, and in short, anything that looked long and dry. All stuff Sam had probably read already, but it wasn't like he lugged a ton of books around with him all the time, for convenience's sake. With a grin, picked up a dog-eared paperback copy of _The Bourne Identity_ by Robert Ludlum—which of _course_ he'd known was a book before it was a movie—and added it to the sack. He bought the whole lot, after a bit of haggling, for five bucks.

"This is great," Sam had said, his face lighting up like a kid at Christmas when Dean dumped bag of books upside down on Sam's bed. He sifted through the books, grin broadening as he read each title, snorting when he saw the _Bourne_ book in the pile.

"Yup," Dean said, "I'm awesome. I know."

"Seriously, thanks, man." For the look Sam was giving him, you'd have thought Dean had taken a bullet for him or something. But Dean got the underlying message— _Distraction is exactly what I need right now, so thank you for providing it in abundance._

Dean shrugged. "I just thought, you know, in case you get bored poring over the Gideon Bible like you've been doing." He felt his smile fade. "Speaking of that…" he trailed off, giving Sam a pointed look. He'd seen Sam reading the room's Bible the night before, flipping through it after dinner while Dean and Bobby watched TV. He hadn't said anything, but it wasn't like God was on Dean's buddy list at the moment, much less the "new" God, and he wasn't exactly sure how Sam could stomach it, especially the fire-and-brimstone passages. That was part of what had prompted Dean to make the bookstore excursion in the first place.

Sam sighed. "Look, you don't need to worry, okay? It doesn't bother me."

"Well I don't exactly see how it's helping you, either."

He shrugged, eyes clouding a little. "Well it's not like the…uh, the stuff about damnation isn't anything I don't know about. But, um," he looked a little embarrassed. "Y'know, the tenets of Judaism and Christianity are essentially peaceful. I dunno. It's comforting, I guess. The Psalms and stuff. I like 'em."

The next day, a Gideon Bible found its way into the bag of books.

When Sam found it there, he laughed, a bit taken aback but clearly pleased. "You _stole_ a _Bible_?"

Dean shrugged. "Eh, the Gideons'll replace it. It's what they do, right? Dress up in stuffy suits and chuck Bibles at people. Besides, figure it's better to give it to somebody who'll use it than let it rot in some drawer."

Sam shook his head, running his fingers over the glossy cover, and failing altogether at looking disapproving.

…

It wasn't until they were about a day's worth of extra-slow travel from Sioux Falls that it all went wrong.

Dean didn't even understand it—Sam had been doing _fine,_ flopped out on the couch, eating take-out and watching an old John Wayne movie with Dean and Bobby, when he got up to go to the bathroom and never came out.

Only three minutes had gone by when Dean first started to get the feeling something was up. Sam hated missing bits of movies, however small, because he'd always claim that he'd miss something important if he left the room for however short a period of time, even when he'd seen it before, because he was ridiculous like that. It'd been that way ever since he was four years old and watching freaking _Land Before Time,_ and Dean could still hear Sam whining for him to pause the tape, because _I gotta go to da bafwoom and somefin bad might happen to Widdlefoot if I'm not watchin'._

He gave it another two minutes before he started banging on the door. "Sam?"

When there was no answer, Dean's blood froze. Bobby flicked the TV off, eyeing the bathroom door with concern.

He banged again, harder. "Sammy? You alright?"

No response.

Stomach plummeting, he rattled the doorknob, fearing the worst. "Dammit, Sam, open the door!"

Then, a small, barely audible, "Dean?"

He let out a breath, relief washing through him. "Yeah. Open up, dude." If Sam was responding to him—if Dean could still get through to him—they were still okay.

Through the door, Dean heard an odd sound—like breathy laughter, tinny when it reverberated off the walls.

"Sam, open the door," Dean said, the laughter setting his teeth on edge.

"Can't," came the faint response.

"Can't?" Dean repeated. "What do you mean _can't_?" He shot a nervous glance at Bobby, who had come up beside him, straining to listen through the door as well. Bobby's eyes cut to the door, brow furrowed.

Yet again, no answer.

"Sammy!" Dean yelled, rattling the doorknob again.

"Help me," Sam muttered a second later, voice barely audible even through the cheap, thin door. "Please."

Dean gulped. "Okay, man, we're coming . Just hang in there, okay?" he called back to Sam in as reassuring a tone as he could manage.

"'Kay…"

And on a count of three, Dean and Bobby kicked the door in.

At the sight that met him inside the bathroom, Dean was pretty sure his heart stopped for a good few seconds.

There was Sam, leaning against the side of the bathtub, his legs sprawled out under him like an overgrown child. He was blinking up at Dean and Bobby, dazed and wide-eyed. A pocketknife— _Dean's_ pocketknife, in fact—was clutched tightly in the fingers of one hand.

And there was blood.

Everywhere.

It took Dean a minute to work through his blind panic to realize that the source of the blood was Sam's arms: he'd gouged into the flesh of both, and the blood soaking the front of his t-shirt and sweats and dripping little puddles onto the floor.

Sam held up both his arms. His eyes watered. "Please," he repeated. "There's s-something in me."

Dean went to drop to the floor in front of Sam, but Bobby stopped him. "He's still got a knife," Bobby muttered, and held Dean back.

Sam's face crumpled in apparent agony, and then he held one arm in front of his face, as though scrutinizing the wounds.

"Sam?"

"There's something in me," Sam repeated, and he raised the knife and sliced through his arm once more, twisting the blade, digging it into his skin.

"No!" Dean wrenched himself out of Bobby's hold and launched himself at Sam.

He grabbed the wrist of the hand in which Sam held the knife, tightening his fingers around it even as Sam cried out at the pain from the bruises there. But Sam didn't let go, and with a snarl he tried to bring the knife down onto his other arm, which Dean had pinned by his own cast-covered one. "Get it _out_ ," Sam was growling through his teeth as he struggled ferociously against Dean. "Get it _out_!"

A few seconds later and Sam finally tore his wrist from Dean's grasp, bringing the knife down at an awkward angle towards Dean's arm. The knife glanced off the side of the cast, and Sam lost his hold on it. It clattered to the floor. Dean snatched it up and threw it aside.

…Only to have Sam start bashing his arms, hard, against the toilet seat, leaving bloody smears across the white surface.

"Sam, _no,_ " Dean said, lunging for Sam's arms. He grabbed at one of them, and Bobby stepped in to reach for the other. Sam struggled, screaming, twisting back and forth, and kicking his legs viciously. But he couldn't free himself, even with Dean's and Bobby's fingers slipping in his blood.

Abruptly, Sam stopped struggling, and fell still. He looked up, eyes flicking between Dean and Bobby rapid-fire. Awareness flooded back into his eyes, as if somebody had thrown a switch. His breath was coming in harsh gasps. He looked petrified. His eyes settled on Dean.

"Dean…" he choked out.

"Yeah?" Dean managed, heart racing.

"You g-got blood on your cast."

Then Sam's eyes rolled back, and he went limp beneath them.

" _Sam!_ "

…

While he was out, they dragged him to the nearest bed, Dean cursing himself a billion times over for having forgotten his pocket-knife on the bathroom counter late that afternoon, stomach lurching at the pallor of Sam's face and the brightness of the blood seeping from his arms.

"Fuck," Dean muttered, running a hand over his mouth once they had Sam settled. "God _damn_ it…"

"Here," Bobby said urgently, throwing a towel snatched hastily from the bathroom at him. "Hold that to his other arm."

"Yeah." Dean caught the towel and bent over Sam, pressing the towel to the ruined flesh of his arm, gulping back a rush of bile at the sight of it, the feeling of warmth soaking through the towel. He looked over at Bobby, doing the same on Sam's other side, expression no less bleak than Dean felt. "Does he need an ambulance?" Dean asked. Normally, had this been a hunting injury, they'd have tried to deal with it themselves, provided it wasn't life-threatening. But they also knew that potential vascular damage, or severe muscular damage, weren't things to be fucked with. It was the reason they'd dragged Sam to the ER last time he'd gotten his arms sliced open—by the ghouls wearing Adam and Kate's faces—despite the fact that Dean had had to bust Sam out before he could be placed under suicide watch.

Bobby shook his head, adjusting the towel. "Not if you don't want 'em to lock him up for goin' postal on himself. But if it's somethin' we ain't able to fix, then yeah, we'll call."

Dean nodded. "Yeah, okay." But even though the prospect of Sam being under lockdown for "his own good" was enough to turn Dean's stomach, there was still an awful lot of blood. Too much.

Sam was out cold the entire time it took to clean out the wounds, not even the hiss and burn of the peroxide enough to wake him. Dean and Bobby had decided that, despite how bad it'd initially looked, the wounds really weren't as deep as they feared, and that there was only very slight muscle damage, nothing that time wouldn't fix. But they were fresh out of topical anesthetic—they'd been meaning to replace it before Lisa and Ben had disappeared—and right as Bobby stuck the needle in for the first stitch, Sam came to.

Screaming.

Dean had to throw himself on top Sam to pin him down, while Bobby fought to hold still the arm he was working on.

"Sam," Dean grunted, pushing Sam's shoulders back against the bed as best he could while Sam writhed and squirmed under him, eyes full of sheer animal terror and pain and confusion. "You gotta calm down, dude. You're gonna hurt yourself."

Sam couldn't keep up resistance for very long, blood loss finally taking its toll, and he gave up struggling, finally lying motionless. He looked up at Dean, chest heaving, tears in his eyes.

"Sam?" Dean asked uncertainly.

Sam blinked.

"Sammy?" he tried again. "You with me now?"

Sam shook his head minutely, the fear in his eyes pushed out by helpless anger. "Lemme go," he growled.

"I can't," Dean said steadily, though the anger and total lack of recognition was like a slap in the face. "Not until we get you patched up, okay? It's this or the hospital, man."

Sam's forehead scrunched up. "Hospital?" he repeated.

"Yeah, hospital. And if we go there, they're gonna take you away from me. And I don't want that to happen, but it will if you can't calm down and let us help you, alright?"

Sam's brow scrunched further. "Dean?"

_Finally._ Dean let out a breath, grinned, and nodded. "Yeah. Right here, Sammy."

Some of the tension left Sam's shoulders. He gave a small, tremulous smile of his own. "Dean?" he repeated.

"Yeah?"

"M'arms hurt…"

"I know. Just…" He glanced at Bobby. "Let Bobby stitch you up, okay? It'll be over before you know it, I promise."

"'Kay." His eyes drifted shut. "Dean?"

"What?"

"D-did you get it out?"

"Uh, yeah." Dean nodded. He was pretty sure he didn't even want to know what Sam was talking about. "We got it out. You're okay now. Just take it easy, okay?"

"'Kay." But he cried out when Bobby started in on the stitches once more.

And for the next several hours, Dean found himself pinning a hurting and terrified Sam down, who clearly had no idea what the hell was happening to him, or more to the point, why Dean was letting it happen. Dean passed the time whispering a litany of meaningless reassurances in his ear, and trying not to be sick at the sharp, metallic scent of his brother's blood that was barely masked by the peroxide. He was almost relieved when Bobby started in on the second arm and Sam finally passed out again.

3 AM came and went, 4 AM. Sam's arms were eventually mummified in bandages, and he was left to rest flopped out on the bloody sheets with his ankles cuffed. Bobby, completely spent, was snoring away on the other bed, blood he'd hardly bothered to wash away splattered up to his elbows.

Dean, his insides numb and heavy, had taken the couch. Fatigue tugged at him, body aching from having had to hold Sam down for so long. He wanted to sleep, he did. He tried. Why the hell not, after all. Nothing had changed.

But it was that very same thought that _kept_ him from rest.

_Nothing_ had changed.

They were right back where they'd started, weren't they?

Hell, they were _worse._

But Sam slept on, oblivious.


	8. Chapter 8

By the time they'd gotten themselves back to Bobby's, Sam seemed to have shut down completely—he was listless, barely spoke at all. And, thanks to an infection that set in a day or so after he'd slashed open his arms, he had a fever to boot. He'd tacitly continued accepting the Quetiapine when Dean gave it to him, but as Dean hadn't heard him speak more than a few words in all of the three days since the… _incident_ , Dean had no way of gauging how well they were working. Yeah, they made him tired, and that combined with the fever and the blood loss made him sleep, a _lot_ , but when he was awake, he was hardly any more responsive. His eyes would dart around the room like the walls were closing in on him whenever he wasn't staring into space, which was the majority of the time, and he'd taken to crying out in his sleep again. More than a few times Dean had found him, in the midst of some nightmare, trying to tear off the bandages and muttering incoherently under his breath. Unable to cuff him without hurting his torn up wrists, Dean had given Sam his sling from the hospital that he himself had long since stopped bothering with, binding up his left arm—the more injured the two—to keep him from messing with the bandages on both arms during the day and, well, at least slow him down at night. Sam had looked indifferent when he'd proposed the idea, stiffening when Dean had approached him to help him put the sling on but remaining silent.

Freaking _silent._

And by the fourth day, Dean couldn't take it anymore.

Bobby was at his desk doing research for a friend in Boston tracking down a poltergeist, and Sam was on the couch, folded in on himself and staring vacantly at his knees while the grainy TV played some bland infomercial in the background. Dean had sat with him for awhile, drink in hand, knowing he wouldn't get a response if he tried and unable to do a damn thing but force painkillers, antibiotics, and more Quetiapine on him every now and then. Sam took them, and let Dean check the bandages, but offered no comment—didn't even _look_ at him. And Dean knew it was petty, he _knew_ , but despite himself it left him a little pissed. Not even at Sam, really. Just at everything else. The whole damn situation.

At any rate, he needed to get out.

So he muttered something about going to go check out the car and took off, shutting the door with a little more force than necessary behind him.

…Only to find out that it had just begun to rain.

Awesome.

The air was warm enough, though, coupled with the warmth from the drink that was making his head buzz pleasantly. And the rain was light, so he figured he could wander for awhile. The car was in one of the garages, anyways. He'd get a good look at the car and at least assess the damage, take stock of what he'd need for the job and what needed to be replaced, even if he had to wait a couple more weeks before he could get the cast off and do any actual work.

At least until he could go back inside without feeling like he was suffocating.

An hour or so later and the rain was beginning to pick up. He already had an extensive mental list of what could be salvaged and what needed replacing, and was now wandering the yard, his shirt stuck to his back with rain and droplets running down the sides of his cast, trying to figure out what parts he could nab from which old rustbuckets out here to make his baby like new again.

It should've been depressing. The damage was pretty much as bad as he'd feared it'd be. Plus, hunting down the right parts from a zillion and a half crappy-ass cars that didn't run was a bit like playing one giant game of Where's Waldo, but the kicker was, he was enjoying himself.

He liked cars. Cars always made sense, even when nothing else did. He could rebuild one from the ground up, if need be.

If only the same could be said about people.

It was starting to get dark, the rain getting stronger and the early autumn air cooling off, by the time he'd done everything he could do that didn't involve physically working on the car. He'd even done a few things that _did_ involve physically working on the car that he knew Bobby—or Sam, if he was aware enough—would probably bitch at him about. His shirt was wet and his arm was aching from hauling around rusty parts when he finally decided to suck it up and head back inside, change into some dry clothes, maybe grab another drink.

He went to lock the smallish garage that held the Impala before he headed in—the last thing they needed was some douchewad trying to steal it, even if there wasn't all that much to steal at the moment. But as he was stowing the keys in his pocket and turning around, he saw a figure stumbling towards him through the rain that was now coming down in veritable buckets, head bowed, stringy wet hair sticking to his face. Five seconds later and Sam had practically crashed into the steel door of the garage, hands scrabbling against the rusted metal surface to find something to hold onto before his knees buckled and he fell over.

"Sam, what the—" Dean lurched forward as Sam listed to one side and caught his shoulder, propping him up against the garage door. "Whoa, okay, no kissin' asphalt, alright?" He searched Sam's face for some sign he was listening, but Sam's eyes were distant, vague, his face flushed. "God, look at you," Dean continued in a mutter. "You're friggin' soaked." They both were—he could feel his own hair dripping water into his eyes—but Sam was the one who happened to be fighting off illness and infection, and Dean could feel the shivering beneath the steadying hand he had pressed to Sam's chest.

" _Hey_ ," he said, more insistently, shaking Sam's shoulder with his casted hand. "Earth to Sam. Come on, man, snap out of it."

Sam blinked, slowly. Once, twice. His brow knit, and his expression took on the approximate appearance of a bewildered three-year-old. Then, suddenly, his eyes screwed shut and he inhaled sharply. Dean felt him tense up.

"Sam?"

Sam shook his head tightly and let out a low, pain-filled moan.

"Sam, what—"

But Sam's knees chose that moment to finally give out, and Dean found himself catching and lowering Sam into a sitting position against the door, frantically sinking to his own knees—right into a puddle that he was sure hadn't been there an hour ago—and shaking Sam's shoulders, trying to rouse him. "Sammy? Talk to me, man. Are you hurt?"

Sam stirred, eyes opening a fraction to squint up at Dean. "Mmm…"

"Sam, tell me what's wrong," Dean demanded, eyes scanning for apparent injury. Aside from the fact that the bandages were soaked through and needed replacing, and the obvious fever, there didn't appear to be anything the matter. And that, if possible, just freaked Dean out all the more.

Sam's eyes squeezed shut again. He sniffed once, wetly, but not before a drop of blood could escape his nose and run down his lip. Dean stared at it, feeling suddenly ill himself. "Mm…m'h-head hurts…" Sam ground out through clenched teeth. More blood trickled out of his nose, sluggishly.

_Damn it._ The sudden, debilitating headaches, always accompanied by an assault of fresh memories, were one thing that had tapered off with the Quetiapine.

Apparently not.

And whether it was because of the fever or was somehow Sam's head's way of protesting the unwelcome memories, Dean didn't like the nosebleed, either.

Sam's head rolled forward, drops of blood splashing onto his lap.

"No, nuh-uh," Dean said, shaking him a little harder, which elicited a sharp intake of breath as the movement undoubtedly jarred Sam's head. "Stay with me here, Sammy."

Sam lifted his head a bit, a dull flicker of irritation in his eyes. "Gah…stop sh-shaking me…"

"Gotta stay awake, dude," Dean said unapologetically, anxiety forming a tight knot in his chest. Sam's eyelids drooped and he shook him again, eliciting a sharp cry this time. "Can't haul your ass anyplace on my own if you check out on me."

"Y-you s-suck." Sam spoke through chattering teeth, shivering in earnest now, but he kept his eyes open.

"Come on. Let's get you outta the rain, huh?"

"'Kay."

Dean wasn't sure how they managed it, with three arms between them essentially out of commission and Sam's legs shaking like an overgrown colt beneath him, but soon they were on their feet and stumbling towards the garage's side door.

They'd only made it two steps, though, before Sam was doubled over and puking all over both their feet. Dean had to lunge to grab him around the waist before he collapsed onto the puddly, vomit-covered pavement. Sam eventually straightened up, wiping his mouth and bloody nose on a bandaged arm, looking sheepish and sicker than ever.

"'S okay," Dean said easily, trying to ignore his own churning stomach. "I didn't like these shoes anyway."

"S-sorry," Sam choked out.

"It's cool. But let's get you someplace dry." He nodded at the door. "Think there's a towel in there, long as you don't mind smelling like motor oil afterwards."

Sam let himself be steered to the door, and leaned against the wall by it, eyes shut tight again and face screwed up against the pain in his head while Dean fished in his pockets for the key and unlocked the door.

"Alright, let's go." He grabbed Sam's shoulder and nudged him in the direction of the open door.

But Sam stayed rooted to the spot, body visibly stiffening as he stared through the doorway into the shadowy garage. He shook his head slowly. "Not goin' in there," he whispered. All remaining color was gone from his face, eyes gone glassy and lips trembling.

Dean looked from Sam to the open door. "You want me to turn the light on first?" he asked, but he knew even before Sam shook his head jerkily and backed up several steps that it was no use. He swore under his breath. "Alright, come on. Let's get you back to the house, then."

High above them, thunder rumbled.

...

When they finally, freaking _finally_ made it back to Bobby's front porch, they were both soaked to the skin, boots coated in mud and hair plastered to their faces. And _damn_ but who knew September could get this cold this fast. Dean may has well have carried Sam back, as he'd spent the whole time wracked with violent shivers and dragging his feet, almost bent in half with the force of nausea. And when Dean dropped Sam unceremoniously on Bobby's couch and then collapsed bonelessly down next to him, Bobby chose that moment to storm into the room and demand where they'd been, worry etched into every line on his face, and then proceed to swear colorfully when Dean tiredly explained.

"Damn it," Bobby growled, then rubbed absently at his temple as though he too had a headache. "Why didn't he just come find me if it was that bad? I was right in the other room."

"You w-were in the bathroom," Sam muttered, surprising them both. They thought he'd passed out or fallen asleep—his head had rolled back against the couch cushions, eyes shut and breath coming in shallow pants. And of course Bobby hadn't heard Sam speak a word in days. "H-hurt too much to knock…or y-yell for you s-so I went to f-find Dean." His eyes opened a fraction. "S-sorry," he said, looking slightly embarassed, as if he'd realized as the words had come out of his mouth that he'd pretty much done the most irrational thing he could've done, stumbling blindly out into a gathering storm instead of just lying on the couch and waiting a minute or two. But Dean wondered, seeing the shadow in his eyes, whether that was the whole story, and doubted it, knowing the headaches were always accompanied by a nasty bombardment of memory.

Bobby ran a hand over his face, looking suddenly exhausted. He shook his head. "Don't be. Ain't your fault." He glanced at the rain now pelting against the living room window. "Just hope you two idjits didn't catch your death out there."

"Pfft, rain," Dean said, smiling wearily. "It'll take more'n that to do us in." Though truth be told, "done in" was a pretty adequate description of how he was feeling right about now. The cold and damp seemed to have sunk into his bones, making him feel about ten years older than he was.

"Speak f-for yourself," Sam grumbled, though he too was grinning faintly, albeit in a resigned sort of way. "C-can I get some Tylenol now?"

...

Two hours later and Sam was dried, changed, his bandages replaced, drugged up and out cold with a 102.5 degree fever. And this time they had cuffed his wrists, just in case. Dean himself had nearly fallen asleep in the shower, but he was currently sitting with Bobby at the kitchen table over coffee because _eh, what the hell,_ he probably wasn't going to get any actual sleep tonight anyways. Not with Sam as sick as he was. He'd probably looked pathetically grateful when Bobby slid him an unmarked flask across the table, and he tipped a generous amount of amber liquid into the coffee.

Outside, the storm was only getting worse, the rain practically pounding dents into the roof by the sound of it. They sat in silence for awhile. Bobby was still poring over the poltergeist research. Dean attempted to help but just wound up staring at the exact same random spot on the page, clutching his mug in a white-knuckled grip, letting the warmth seep into frigid fingers. For all that the booze-and-coffee concoction had seemed so appealing all of five minutes ago, he'd barely drunk any of it.

Bobby eventually seemed to noticed that Dean wasn't actually _doing_ anything.

"Y'okay?" he asked in a low voice.

Dean shrugged. "Fine," he replied dully.

"Fine, huh?" He pushed the flask back towards Dean. Dean caught it up, popped the cap with his thumb, and drank out of it straight.

The liquor burned his throat. He cleared it, and looked down at the open book before him with poorly masked distaste.

"Eh, just give it up," Bobby said, rolling his eyes, reaching across the table to grab the book from him. "Some help you are."

"Sorry, Bobby."

Bobby shrugged. "Just as well. Gettin' about ready to turn in myself anyhow. Besides," he added after a moment's pause. "Tomorrow we might oughta start lookin' to see what we can find about de-juicin' angels who've gulped down about a billion souls."

They'd had this discussion before—they both knew it wasn't likely that they were going to find anything—but it was a nice thought, that they might actually be able to do something about Cas if they couldn't about Sam. But at the moment, though? Thinking about Cas on top of everything else just made Dean tired and sad. He shrugged, then tried (and failed miserably) for a smile. "Yeah. Great." He paused. "And while we're at it I'm, uh, I think I'm gonna give Missouri a call."

Truth was, he'd already called her, the morning after Sam had hurt himself. And even though he knew it wasn't fair of him, he'd kind of lost his shit over the phone and chewed her out for no good reason. Not like it was her fault that the pills hadn't worked, but he hadn't exactly been thinking too clearly at the time, and it was easier to place blame somewhere, anywhere, than to admit defeat. Missouri, of course, had snapped right back at him— _Don't you take that tone with me, boy_ and such—and had told him, before hanging up, to call her back once he had his head on straight. He had been seething when he'd gotten off the phone with her, but by now he'd realized that she was right, that he needed to suck it up and call her back, let her help.

Of course, part of his hesitancy to call back came from the niggling suspicion that nothing else she had to suggest would do any good.

But she could come visit, at least. It might not help, but it couldn't hurt.

Bobby nodded, expression a shade grimmer but understanding. "I can call up Milburn again too, if you like, see what he thinks."

Dean nodded, cleared his throat. "Yeah, maybe. But, uh, we'll what Missouri says first."

"Alright," Bobby said. He started stacking up his books and papers. "Listen," he said after a moment. "For all we know this is all just a problem with dosage or drug type or some crap like that that we wouldn't know anything about. We ain't exactly professionals here." _So chill out and cut yourself a break._ The message was loud and clear. And even though Dean wasn't sure he bought what Bobby was saying, he was both ludicrously grateful for it and embarrassingly close to getting choked up.

…Yup, definitely time to turn in. He didn't exactly wanna lose it and throw a damn tantrum at Bobby's kitchen table. He managed a nod. "Yeah. I know." He stood. "I'm, uh, gonna—" He gestured vaguely in the direction of the ceiling.

"Good plan. And try to get a decent night's shut-eye, you hear?" He pointed at Dean's mostly-full coffee cup. "You barely touched your joe, so you got no excuse."

"Will do," Dean muttered, turning to leave. And truth be told, he _was_ tired. In all possible senses of the word. And last he'd checked, Sam had seemed like he was down for the count for the next several hours at least, and was restrained at any rate.

Yeah, sleep might actually be nice.

"Because the last thing we need is for you to go and have another pansy-ass faintin' spell and leave us to drag your sorry ass to the ER again," Bobby added. He was smiling, but he meant it.

Dean returned the smile resignedly. "You're not gonna let that go, are you?"

A grin. "Nope."

...

Bobby had been right about Dean needing sleep. _Really_ needing sleep.

So much so that it was around noon the next day when he finally managed to drag himself out of bed and stumble to the bathroom. He could hear Bobby puttering around downstairs, and Sam's room was quiet when he walked past, the door slightly ajar and the lights out—he'd probably woken up and gone downstairs by now too—so he figured he could take his time. A shower—always rather painstaking process with his arm sticking awkwardly out of the shower curtain—and a shave later, and Dean felt much more alive than he had in days. Looked better, too, he realized, when he got a good look in the mirror. Both eyes were still black but it looked less like he'd gotten punched and more like he was a chronic insomniac, which he figured was a marginal improvement.

He was passing Sam's door on his way downstairs, having changed into the cleanest clothes he could find, when he heard it—a low stream of muttering coming from inside the shadowy room.

Frowning, he stopped, and pushed the door open.

Sam hadn't gone downstairs yet. He was on his back on top of the guest bed, the old quilt half hanging off the bed and half rumpled on top of his chest, wrists and ankles still restrained. He was staring blankly at the ceiling, mumbling words Dean couldn't comprehend under his breath. When the door creaked open and light from the hall flooded the room, Sam turned his head towards Dean and blinked, owlishly.

"Sam?"

He blinked again. "Mm?"

"How long have you been up?" Obviously not that long—Bobby would've come up to check on him recently, and would've let him out of the restraints had he been awake.

Sam didn't answer, eyes rolling back to rest on the dusty ceiling fan above him.

He muttered something again, louder than before but not loud enough for Dean to hear. Dean ventured a few steps closer to the bed and sat down on the edge. Sam started a bit, body twitching as the old mattress sagged under Dean's weight, but then his eyes found Dean's, and he let out a long breath, body relaxing again.

And God, he looked terrible. Dean couldn't see him a hundred percent clearly—the only light in the room being from the hallway and the curtains all drawn—but it was enough. Unsettling pallor, damp t-shirt sticking to him, dull eyes that looked nearly as bruised as his own. The stuffy air smelled of sweat, antiseptic, and illness.

Sam smiled wanly, seeming to realize Dean had been staring at him, and then muttered some more at the ceiling.

"What's that, Sam?" Dean leaned in a bit, a sick feeling pulling at his gut. Obviously Sam wasn't quite lucid at the moment.

"I saw…I s-saw the b-best minds of my generation d-destroyed by madness…" Sam said, voice soft and vague, gaze wandering aimlessly around the ceiling tiles. "B-by madness," he repeated shakily. "S-starving, hysterical, naked—" he cut off with a shuddering sigh, fingers twitching a bit where they lay on his stomach.

"Huh?" Dean asked, brow knitting. _The hell…?_

Sam glanced at him. "'S Ginsberg," he said, then laughed, breathily, manically. The sound grated Dean's nerves. "'S good. P-postmodernism." His eyes closed, the ghost of a smile on his lips.

And then Dean remembered something—a brief, random flash of a sixteen-year-old Sam, laid up with a nasty bout of mono, spouting forth a few random, flowery lines of _Teach me, muse, of the man of many ways_ and some crap about ancient Greek ships. It'd had Dean freaked to hell that the fever was frying his brain until Sam had giddily explained, right before practically passing out in the motel bed, that he was reading _The Odyssey_ for school and " _'S friggin' brilliant, y'should read it, D'n."_ Once Sam had recovered, Dean teased him about it for a good six months afterwards.

Dean's shoulders sagged a bit, and he let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. So this wasn't because Sam was nuts. Or, not much. He was just spouting random lines of postmodern poetry because he was sick and loopy. _That_ Dean could deal with. "Yeah, okay, Sammy," he said. He reached towards him to check his temperature, withdrawing it when Sam flinched away from him. "Hey, it's okay, just checking on that fever, dude," he said, holding up both hands, tone placating.

"'Kay," he breathed, and let Dean lay a careful hand on his forehead.

Dean frowned at the heat under his hand. "Shit," he muttered. Not that he hadn't expected it, but still, they were trying to avoid a hospital visit here. "Let's get some water and Tylenol in you, alright? No wonder you're tripping out right now." He tapped the cuffs on Sam's wrists. "You want outta these?" Because coupled with infected wounds, bandaged or no, those had to suck.

"Mhmm." He started to lift his joined wrists towards Dean, then hissed in pain and let them drop onto his stomach again.

"It's okay. I got it. Be right back." The keys were in the bedside drawer of his own guest room. "Don't move 'till I get back."

Sam didn't move. Even after Dean uncuffed him, and took the shackles off his ankles, he just laid there, sweat beading on his forehead, eyes still open but not saying a word.

"Okay, uh," Dean began, awkwardly, "How 'bout that Tylenol, huh?" he stood up. "And once we get those bandages checked out you can hit the sack again if you need to, so—"

"Don' wanna sleep," Sam muttered under his breath, voice cracking a bit.

"Okay," Dean said, unable to keep concern out of his voice. "You want some breakfast? Er, lunch?" he corrected, reading the time on the digital clock on the bedside table. "Should still be sandwich stuff in the fridge from yesterday, roast beef. Or, ah, PB&J if you want it."

Sam didn't answer.

"Alrighty then, no sandwiches it is," Dean said after a moment, and turned to leave, but Sam's voice stopped him in the doorway.

"I'm crazy, aren't I?"

His voice was low, quiet.

Scared.

Dean froze for a second before turning around to face him, because _damn,_ how exactly do you answer something like that?

When he did turn around, it was to find Sam watching him, gaze fever-bright but focused, beseeching.

"Well I mean…you're the one spoutin' out lines of Ginsberg, man," Dean said with a faint smile. "But I'm betting that's just the fever talking."

Sam wasn't buying it. "Dean," he said, in his best pleading, friggin' dewy-eyed, _don't-bullshit-me-I-need-to-know_ tone.

Which meant he was freaked to hell.

Dean sighed and stepped into the room. "Look," he said, moving to sit on the edge of the bed again. "You're not crazy. You've just…seen a lot more shit than most people. Hell, I think it's safe to say you've seen more shit than _anybody._ And if that equals crazy, then fine, I think you've earned the fucking right to be crazy. And screw anybody who's got a problem with that, 'cause you're the reason they're still here." He turned towards Sam. "You got that?"

Sam gulped and nodded. He looked torn somewhere between somewhat relieved and ready to break down and weep. After a few seconds, he shut his eyes and let out a shaky laugh. "So crazy's a p-privilege, huh?"

Dean frowned. "Not exactly what I meant, dude."

"I know." He raised his arms an inch. "S-some privilege though."

"Yeah. Really." Dean looked at the bandages for a moment, and Sam must've not liked what he saw in Dean's expression, because his own face, and he lowered his arms again.

"You know…" Sam began, suddenly looking uncertain. "You know I w-wasn't trying to h-hurt myself, right?"

"Yeah," Dean assured him. "No, I know." Not that it wasn't nice to hear him say it anyway, but he wasn't going to admit as much. He paused. "Would it, uh…would it help any if you told me what actually happened, though? Like, uh, what you saw?" This was a topic they hadn't really broached, mostly because Dean had thought that if Sam started talking about the stuff he was seeing, it'd just kick Sam's imagination into overdrive and make things about a billion times worse. And Sam hadn't volunteered much information, either, apparently preferring to keep all of his lucid moments as Hell-free and in the present as possible. And Dean couldn't fault him for that; wasn't like he didn't have some personal experience about not being an open book when it came to Hell memories.

But nothing else was working, so why not try? Maybe it'd be cathartic or something, make it seem less real. It wasn't exactly a possibility that occurred to him, probably because he simply didn't want to know.

"N-no, p-probably not," Sam said, glancing down at his arms, something like fear creeping into his eyes.

"Alright. Your call," he said gently, and started to stand up to go.

"W-wait," Sam said, and Dean sat back down, but his eyes cut away when Dean looked at him. "D'you, uh…d'you r-remember that scene in _The Mummy_? W-with that guy, a-and the scarab beetles?"

"What?"

"The s-scarab beetles," Sam repeated, voice faint, "T-they got under his skin, and b-before they could kill him the other guy h-had to take a knife and—" his voice died, and he swallowed convulsively.

And then Dean understood.

_There's something in me. Please._

His blood froze.

"You mean—"

Sam nodded, eyes closed, now looking very much like he was trying not to throw up. His arms were twitching.

"Oh." As nauseated as Dean himself felt at the thought, he also had to clamp down on a surge of anger— _What did that sick fuck do to my brother?_

"Yeah. I j-just wanted…I thought it was gonna k-kill me…" He sounded flustered, as if exhaustion was claiming him again, but imploring, as though he needed Dean to understand this.

"Nah, it's okay, it's okay," he said quickly, reassuring, patting Sam's leg lightly. "You didn't do anything wrong, man. I'dve done the same." He shrugged. "Hell, I'dve probably done worse."

"Really?"

"Yeah," he said, and shuddered. "I hate beetles."

"That's n-not funny," Sam said, but the corners of his mouth twitched.

"Probably not," Dean conceded. "Oh, hey, Bobby's gonna call up that Milburn guy, see about changing your dosages or trying you on something new," he added, trying his best to sound optimistic. He figured he didn't need to mention that he was also calling Missouri, groveling a bit, and then as good as begging her to come visit right the hell _now_. He doubted Sam would take it well, and Dean had his dignity, after all.

Sam looked away, eyes fixing on something over near the open door. "Don't b-bother," he said quietly.

Dean followed his gaze to the empty doorway, and his stomach dropped, but he pressed on anyway, pretending he hadn't noticed. "Come on, don't be a melodramatic bitch about it."

"'M not," he said, with far less irritation than Dean expected, and without looking away from the spot.

"And don't pretend that you're a friggin' pharmacist here, either," he added. "I mean, if it's just a thing about how many pills you're popping or what kind, we can fix that. And the Quetiapine worked."

"Until it d-didn't," Sam muttered.

"So you take an extra one," Dean said, but he had the feeling that he knew what lay at the heart of Sam's objections, because it was exactly the same thing he was now waking in fear of every single day.

That eventually, everything would fail.

"N-no, you don't—" Sam began, agitated, then sighed. "The pills worked. T-they did. I was still s-seeing stuff b-but…I could tell." He continued to stare, transfixed, at the doorway, eyes growing a bit wider, but continued to speak. "I could tell, a-and I'd t-tell them—like, the s-stuff I was seeing—tell them t-that they weren't r-real, and they'd l-l-leave me alone. But now…" His breath hitched, his eyes now completely round and terrified as he stared through the door. "N-now they just laugh at me. _He_ laughs at me," he added softly.

"You mean you're hearing—"

"Sometimes," he whispered, his face gone ashen. "R-recently."

"Shit." No wonder he was having such a hard time distinguishing reality from the cage, if his torturer was popping back into his life every so often. Not that Dean hadn't suspected it might be happening, but still. "Is that why you weren't talkin' to us?"

"Yeah. S-sorry," he added quickly. "J-just figured it'd be easier to k-keep my head on straight if everything was quiet." He paused, looking uncomfortable. "A-and half the time I didn't know you w-were you so I didn't know if I sh-should answer or not."

"And here I just thought you were being your usual emo self," Dean said, with a halfhearted smirk. Sam didn't respond. "But on the plus side you know it's me right now, huh?"

Sam snorted. The sound was humorless. "No, I d-don't."

"Sam…" he started, but trailed off, frustrated, because what exactly was he supposed to say to that?

"You still think I'm n-not crazy?" Sam asked, a bitter edge to his voice. And Dean must've looked upset at that, because Sam immediately looked apologetic. "S-sorry. It's just…Y'know even w-when I do know you're you a-and Bobby's Bobby…a lot of the time I-I don't understand you, o-or hear you at all. I m-mean, you know that, you've seen it happen enough t-times."

"So you get spacey sometimes," Dean said with a shrug. "Not the end of the world. And yeah, it sucks, but we're dealing. And you always come back, don't you?" _….Eventually._

"A-and what happens the day I don't?" His voice was small.

"There ain't gonna be a day you _don't_ ," Dean said, hoping to God he sounded convincing. "Not gonna let that happen. Which is why you gotta work with us here about the pills, okay?"

Sam was shaking his head. "Alright," he said. "Do w-what you want, but…"

"But _nothing_ , Sam."

" _B-but_ ," he persisted, "I t-think you know that short of w-waiting it out and just seeing w-what happens, there's only one p-person we could go to who could r-really help, and t-that's Cas, and I d-don't think…"

"Nuh-uh," Dean said promptly.

"'S what I thought y-you'd say," Sam said, raising an eyebrow at Dean's more-vicious-than-intended tone.

"Yeah, well," Dean growled, "even if we weren't number one on Cas's shit list right now, there is no way in hell we are letting him anywhere near you. _Ever._ Got that?"

"We g-gotta help him, Dean."

Dean said nothing. Because yeah, they did, but if Dean had anything to say about it, any "helping" that Sam would be doing would take place from a very safe distance, preferably from another continent.

Sam was watching him, his concerned frown reminding Dean vaguely of Dr. Phil. "He's still our friend," he said.

"Well he's got a funny way of showing it," Dean muttered. On a sudden inspiration, he added, "What about Death?" It had been more to change the subject than anything, but now that he thought about it… "He built you a wall once, he could do it again, right?"

But Sam shook his head. "N-no more deals. He'd want s-something in return. You _know_ he'd want something in return. A-and that's assuming he c-could do it anyway."

"Well if Cas could fix you, so could he," Dean said, liking this plan more and more. "We'd just need the right leverage, is all."

" _No,"_ Sam snapped, then his eyes shuttered, as if the volume of his own voice had made his head ache more. Dean blinked, not having expected such a strong response. "J-just…don't, okay? Don't do anything s-stupid. 'S not worth it."

Dean opened his mouth to respond to that, but Sam's next words shut him up.

"Besides," Sam said, words barely audible as though he was talking more to himself than to Dean, "even if w-we _could_ force Death to do something— _a-anything_ —'s n-not what we should be asking for anyway."

"What?" Dean asked, spluttering a bit. "What do you mean _not what we should be asking for_?"

But Sam's eyes had found the doorway again, and he didn't answer.

Dean looked through the doorway, seeing only the early afternoon sunlight creating shifting, dancing patterns on the dirty floorboards in the hall, and wished for the umpteenth time in the past few weeks that he had the ability to punch hallucinatory monsters in the face. He sighed. _Oh yeah, I'm just dying to know what exactly is so important to ask for that you're willing to throw away your sanity for it…_

"Adam," Sam said suddenly.

"Huh?"

Sam's eyes snapped back to Dean's.

"I'd ask him t-to save Adam."

"Oh."

Yeah, now he understood.

"Well maybe we—"

"Forget it," Sam said sharply. "Sh-shouldn't have said anything."

"Well what if—"

" _No_ more deals. Y-you know better. We b-both do." He looked pained, but resolved, and Dean wondered how long Sam had been considering this, going over all the contingencies in his head.

"Okay," Dean relented. "No more deals."

"P-promise me."

"I promise."

And Dean wasn't _exactly_ lying. Besides, it wasn't like he hadn't already tried to bargain with Death for Adam—and Death had made it perfectly clear, one resurrected brother per customer. He wasn't likely to change his mind, not without one hell of a trump card.

Not unless they could force him.

…And that, actually, was an idea…

Not one he'd share with Sam, obviously, or Bobby, who'd probably call him ten kinds of moron for even thinking it, but he'd certainly be taking a look through some of Bobby's more obscure books, in any case.

But Sam seemed satisfied, at any rate, and relaxed a bit, eyelids drooping from fatigue that was quickly claiming him once more.

"Hey, hey," Dean said, swatting him lightly on the chest. "Pills and bandages first, remember? Then you can sleep all day, for all I care, you lazy ass."

Sam grumbled a little in protest, but obliged, forcing his eyes back open a fraction.

...

Within another half-hour, Sam's arms were disinfected and re-bandaged—not without some difficulty, as the pain of it confused and scared Sam enough that Dean had had to hold his arms immobile a few times until he snapped out of it and calmed down. And he'd taken his Tylenol, and Quetiapine, with some water, although he'd had to let Dean hold the cup up for him because his arms clearly hurt like a bitch from infection, and even if they hadn't, he might've spilled it all over himself due to sheer exhaustion.

However, it was one thing to have somebody hold a cup for you, but it was another thing entirely to be 29 years old and having your adult brother feeding you peanut butter and jelly. In bed.

Sam's face was flushed with humiliation by the time he'd finished, but he had been hungry, and too tired to protest not being allowed to eat on his own. Embarrassed or no, he managed to eat about half of the sandwich. But Dean put the rest of it aside, amused, when Sam dozed-off mid-bite and his head lolled forward onto Dean's arm.

"Okay, princess, don't drool peanut butter on my shirt," he said, lowering Sam back down onto the bed.

Sam mumbled a garbled retort under his breath, but his eyes closed the second his head hit the pillow.

"Mind if I stick around for a bit?" He snatched up the battered copy of _The Bourne Identity_ sitting on top of Sam's book pile on the bedside table. "Might steal this for awhile. Doubt it'll beat the movie, but…"

"'S good, actually…" Sam's voice was muffled by the pillow, the words slurred.

"Alright, geek-boy," Dean said, rolling his eyes. "Anyways, the second I go back downstairs, Bobby'll probably put me to work, and I bet this beats poltergeist research."

Bobby had actually finished all the poltergeist research a few hours earlier, but Sam didn't need to know that.

Dean grinned. "You up for a bedtime story?"

"About assassins?" Sam yawned.

Dean shrugged. "Well, I mean, you did fall asleep the first time we watched _Pulp Fiction,_ remember?"

"I was t-ten…an' I had the flu…"

"Still unforgivable if you ask me, dude," Dean chuckled, opening the book. He flipped to the preface— _The New York Times, Friday, July 11, 1975, Front Page: Diplomats Said To Be Linked With Fugitive Terrorist Known As Carlos—_ but by the time he'd read the first few lines, Sam was already asleep.

Dean shut the book, eased himself off the bed, switched off the lamp he'd put on while redoing the bandages, and moved to a chair. He'd go downstairs in a bit—because nothing in the world sounded better than one gigantic cup of coffee right about now, and maybe he could fix up the last of the roast beef for himself and Bobby—but for now, he'd stay put.

Because Sam was sick. And hurt. And possibly headed full-tilt towards an irreparable psychotic breakdown. And the only two beings in the universe who could really fix him would probably sooner kill them both.

In short, they were screwed.

But that was nothing new.

And for the moment, Sam was asleep. And safe. And _here._

Dean could work with that.

***End***


End file.
